(Newswire.net — January 29, 2015) — The cells of any living organism have two major functions, to multiply and to repair themselves up to a certain degree. Depending on the species, if the cell is too damaged it could not be restored. Tumors are cells damaged beyond repair that multiply creating a tissue.
Everyone knows that when you boil an egg, it turns from jelly-like to a firm structure we can cut in slices. Scientists from The University of California, Irvine (UCI), made a break-through in bioscience when they managed to reverse the egg cells damaged by boiling into their previous state.
“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” Gregory Weiss, the study’s lead author, said in a UCI statement.
Weiss led a team of chemists from UCI and Australia’s Flinders University, who focused on finding a method to efficiently produce or recycle molecular proteins.
“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,” the UCI professor Weiss said.
Weiss told ABC News that until now chemists assumed once you hard-boiled an egg its cells could not be revived because the heat breaks the bonds that hold together the protein’s amino acid strings. As the heat rises, these strings then form new, stronger bonds, forcing out the water and hardening the contents of the egg, CNET reported.
Weiss’ team proved that those broken bonds could be reconnected. They reversed the process so that the proteins could be recovered and reused.
In the egg revival process, Weiss and his colleagues separated the boiled egg whites and yolks from each other, than soaked the whites in Urea, a substance found in human urine, among other places. Urea then chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material.
At the molecular level, protein still exists, but it is unusable. The scientists then used a vortex fluid machine, which spun the whites at high speeds to restore them to their original, un-boiled state.
The scientists are still far away from gaining chicken out of a boiled egg, but that’s not the point anyway.
“It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs; that’s just demonstrating how powerful this process is,” Weiss said in the statement.
Various proteins are being used a lot in pharmaceutical and food industry, sometimes in a very expensive and time-consuming way. Weis’ un-boiling proteins technique is much cheaper and can recreate proteins for use within hours.
The University of California, Irvine has applied for a patent on the work.