Chemists find way to 'unboil' egg
27 Jan 2015
A team of US and Australian chemists claims to have unboiled egg whites by returning a key protein in the egg to working order.
The chemists, based at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and research institutions across Australia, said the technique could be used to dramatically reduce the costs for cancer treatment, food production and segments of the global biotechnology market.
“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg
UCI professor Gregory Weiss
“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,” Weiss said.
According to Weiss, processing a hen’s egg is merely a demonstration of the capability of his team’s technique.
“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,” Weiss said.
“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. It speeds things up by a factor of thousands.”
In order to recreate the protein lysozyme, Weiss and his team added a urea substance that chewed away at the egg whites, liquefying the solid material.
The scientists then employed vortex fluid technology - a device designed by professor Colin Raston’s laboratory at South Australia’s Flinders University.
Shear stress within thin, microfluidic films was applied to small pieces of protein, forcing them back into untangled, proper form, the researchers said.
According to the researchers, this process could revolutionise industrial and research production of proteins in areas such as the creation of cancer antibodies.
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, the researchers said.
They also said that industrial cheese makers who use recombinant proteins in their processes could use this technique to achieve “more bang for their buck”.
A full account of the research has been published in the journal ChemBioChem.
