Scientists Discover Way To Un-Boil Egg

London: Researchers have managed to unboil an ordinary boiled egg, and the results may haveimplications for cancer treatments, biotechnology and a broad range of food production processes, aBritish daily reported Tuesday.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” The Independent quoted Gregory Weiss, the leadauthor of the study supported by the US and Australian governments, as saying.

A hard-boiled egg white represents proteins that have been cooked, tangled up and — so it wasthought — irreversibly changed.

But the scientists were able to force the proteins apart into their untangled and reusable form. Theyadded a urea substance to break down the cooked egg and then applied a high-powered machinecalled a “vortex fluid device” to achieve the result, the daily said.

“It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs; that’s just demonstrating how powerfulthis process is,” Weiss said.

“The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much timescraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that material.”

Having an effective and quick method for reusing wasted proteins could revolutionise a vast range ofscientific and manufacturing processes. For instance, cancer antibody creation is done using expensivehamster ovary cells as they rarely waste proteins. Thus, using the new process could make cancerresearch and treatments cheaper.

The study was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in the US and theAustralian Research Council, and published last week in the journal ChemBioChem.

Source : Vishwa Gujarat