It does n’t ferment as well as a metaphor for how some things in life are irreversible , but scientists have lately get over a technique for un - cooking bollock ovalbumin .
As an egg get going from raw to boiled , the protein in the ball white changes from limpid , transparent , tightly wound individual clumps to solid , opaque , long tangled strands . To " un - boil " it , scientists would call for to liquefy the social organization and then untangle the protein molecules . Which is on the dot what a group ofresearchers out of UC Irvine have done , issue their finding in the journalChemBioChem .
First , the team precede by Gregory Weiss , UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry , cooked an testis at 90 degree Celsius ( 194 degrees Fahrenheit ) for 20 moment — rendering it not just boiled but certainly overcooked . ( If you plan on eating your egg and not using it for scientific research , unquestionably do n’t moil it that long . )
To start the un - boiling process , the scientists added a urea chemical compound that liquefies the firm message — but it does n’t unpick thing on the molecular stratum . To do that , they made use of a vortex fluid machine , a richly - powered machine develop in Australia that work by implement vivid stress within fragile , microfluidic films to divide the individual protein structures .
But re - sensitive - ifying overcooked egg is scarcely the end secret plan of Weiss ' team ’s enquiry .
" It ’s not so much that we ’re concerned in process the eggs ; that ’s just demonstrating how potent this physical process is , " Weiss said . " The literal trouble is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much clock time scraping off your test tubes , and you want some means of reclaim that material . " The slip Weiss is speak about have wide - ranging implication , including ontogeny of Cancer the Crab treatment , which presently swear on expensive , time - devour methods that can take up to four days to separate tangled proteins .
" The new process takes minutes , " Weiss said . " It speeds things up by a factor of thousands . "
