This is now reversible
Scientists have been able to unboil an egg with the use of chemicals.
They achieved this by adding urea to a hardboiled egg to break down its proteins and thus return it to its liquid form. The then used a machine to re-assemble the broken pieces.
The experts are adamant that this could one day help to lower the cost of cancer treatment as well as the costs involved in cheese making. When an egg is put in a pan to boil the proteins become tangled to form the solid yolk.
The chemists from the University of California Irvine and the University of Western Australia have found that an egg can be un-boiled if the urea is added into the mix.
‘Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,’ said Professor Gregory Weiss, a biochemist at UC Irvine.
‘In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold.’
The team boiled the egg whites for 20 minutes at 90°C (194°F).
They then added the urea to work on the whites to liquefy the solids and break down their proteins.
Urea, is the chemical compound that is found in urine, however it can also be made artificially as well.
The loose proteins are still merged together somewhat and cannot be used so they are put in a vortex fluid device to separate them. The machine stresses the tiny bits of protein making them reverse back to their original liquid form.
The scientists have not confirmed if the eggs are edible after they have been un-boiled.
The aspiration is that i could ‘transform industrial and research production of proteins.’
There has been a struggle among scientists to create or recycle molecular proteins which can be widely applied- they generally distort into the wrong shape- which ultimately makes them useless.
‘It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs - that’s just demonstrating how powerful this process is,’ Professor 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.’
The whole process takes up to 4 days- so it’s very expensive and time consuming of those involved.
‘The new process takes minutes. It speeds things up by a factor of thousands.’
The hope is that if common proteins from the yeast of E.coli bacteria can be reformed quickly and at low cost so that cancer treatments will be more affordable for sufferers. Also in the case of industrial cheese farmers- they could save a lot of money in their use of proteins.