Chemistry major Stephan Kudlacek and professor Greg Weiss have developed a way of unboiling a hen egg. Credit: Steve Zylius / UC Irvine
Posted on 01/26/2015 2:39:12 PM PST by Red Badger
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."
To re-create a clear protein known as lysozyme once an egg has been boiled, he and his colleagues add a urea substance that chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material. That's half the process; at the molecular level, protein bits are still balled up into unusable masses. The scientists then employ a vortex fluid device, a high-powered machine designed by Professor Colin Raston's laboratory at South Australia's Flinders University. Shear stress within thin, microfluidic films is applied to those tiny pieces, forcing them back into untangled, proper form.
"This method … could transform industrial and research production of proteins," the researchers write in ChemBioChem.
For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable. Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck.
UCI has filed for a patent on the work, and its Office of Technology Alliances is working with interested commercial partners.
Explore further: Researchers discover protein protecting against chlorine
More information: ChemBioChem, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10… c.201402427/abstract
Journal reference: ChemBioChem
Provided by University of California, Irvine
Chemistry major Stephan Kudlacek and professor Greg Weiss have developed a way of unboiling a hen egg. Credit: Steve Zylius / UC Irvine
Cheese, eggs and food Ping!
garden?...............
Vortex fluid machine?
Makes a great martini too.
....and Margaritas!...........
I have never needed to do that.
Just think, now some cretin will be able to destroy every meringue pie that's ever made with a simple spritz.
Sounds like a Dr. Evil plot.
Can they un-Obama America?
I know how to unscramble an egg...
Why?
Oops, I boiled that egg by mistake?
Wouldn’t the yolk still be cooked/boiled?
Boiled at 90 C? Hmmm. I guess they’ve changed physics as well.
Fool your friends...unboilable egg gag. $9.99 plus S&H,
I don't like boiled eggs anyway.
There’s some people in my family that could benefit from this tech... mulligans until they get those holiday deviled eggs missing that green ring and edible!
I was thinking more like KAOS, I can just see Siegfried trying to explain it to Shtarker (can hear it to, kind of sad).
How do you boil eggs below 100° C?
This is against the laws of Man and Nature! But I DO hate it when there’s ‘gummy proteins’ on my ‘test tubes.’ *SNORT*
We need a Small Livestock Ping List! You start, I’ll follow.
I am currently chicken-less after a fatal fall invasion of @#$%^&*! raccoons. There were no survivors. But I got the ‘coon; a THIRTY EIGHT pounder - full of MY chickens, the jerk!
Circle of Life, Blah, Blah, Blah, LOL!
a solution looking for a problem
Good catch. I glossed right over that little tidbit.
Climb a mountain.
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