Scientists Found A Way To Unboil Hen Eggs – And It Could Be A Breakthrough For Drug-Making And Food Industry

This breakthrough may sound both completely impossible and ridiculously useless at the same time, but do not let it fool you. The ability to uncook an egg opens up a wealth of possibilities as diverse as drug-making and reducing the wastage of food.

Here is how the technique works.

When an egg is boiled, its proteins misfold and tangled up. The underlying idea is quite straightforward. Scientists found a way to untangle these proteins and restore its original folding state.

According to Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry, and Steve Kudlacek, they experimented on a hen egg white that had been cooked at 90 degree Celsius for 20 minutes. The test subject was at the hard-boiled state that you see often. What they did was to add a particular substance and put the blend through a vortex fluid device, which pulls the mess apart and let them snap back into their initial shapes.

The practical application of this finding is enormous, especially with the drug-making industry. Creating new medicine often requires experimenting on a large number of proteins, which will misfold after each test. This technique allows scientists to start over with the same sample, which would otherwise end up discarded. It is both time and money saving, the two desired virtues that everyone wants.

Another benefit of this technique is in the food industry. Enzymes, which are essentially proteins folded in certain ways, play an important part in cheesemaking, winemaking, and baking. The key to ensuring that these processes run smoothly is for manufacturers to have the correct type of proteins they need or else they will have to get rid of them, resulting in a lot of food waste.

Professor Gregory Weiss said that he could not come up with an exact amount of money this method would help save, but it was time-saving and time was money.