Chemists find a way to unboil eggs

[*BlackFox]

UC Irvine and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites – an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published today in the journal ChemBioChem.

"Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry. "In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order."

Like many researchers, he has struggled to efficiently produce or recycle valuable molecular proteins that have a wide range of applications but which frequently "misfold" into structurally incorrect shapes when they are formed, rendering them useless.

"It's not so much that we're interested in processing the eggs; that's just demonstrating how powerful this process is," Weiss said. "The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that material."

But older methods are expensive and time-consuming: The equivalent of dialysis at the molecular level must be done for about four days. "The new process takes minutes," Weiss noted. "It speeds things up by a factor of thousands."

Read more here

[BuDo]

Seems interesting....but I'm not really big on chemistry so I can't truly share in the excitement...

[ltsune]

I'm not sure I fully understand the impact that this finding will have on the world (cancer treatments, food production etc., as mentioned in the article), but I'm very surprised that they actually found a way to do this.

Wouldn't have thought it would be possible to ever unboil an egg. Who knows, maybe one day it's possible to use this to treat patients with high fever whose protein starts to fold (this causes death). It's probably a long way down the road, however, as the folding happens rather quickly (as far as I've understood), and once your blood stops floating, you surely will die rather quickly.

Hopefully they'll find some very useful purpose for this finding

[omier]

It isn't very surprising, it makes sense to be able to have a reverse process for most processes, but I can't say I've ever thought of unboiling something.

[I Am Vegeta]

soon we will be able to unbirth blackfox

just kiding

[Gaigemasta]

soon we will be able to unbirth blackfox

just kiding