It’s one of those problems Earth citizens have been begging scientists to solve for decades – and chemists have finally had their ‘Eureka!’ moment.
This week, scientists revealed how to ‘unboil’ an egg.
‘Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,’ says University of California Irvine biochemistry professor Gregory Weiss.
‘We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.’
The point of the process, using a machine called a ‘vortex fluid device’ isn’t for chefs to be able to reuse leftover bits of egg.
Instead, the process allows chemists to ‘recycle’ difficult-to-make proteins – and could revolutionise the manufacture of cancer treatments and foods.
‘It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs; that’s just demonstrating how powerful this process is,’ 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.’
Previously, it could take days to recycle proteins in this way.
‘The new process takes minutes,’ Weiss said. ‘“It speeds things up by a factor of thousands.’
