Chemists at UC Irivine have explore the way how to unboil an egg. They invent a device for taking apart tangled proteins and having them refold; this allows them to harden the egg when boiling it for 20 minutes at 194 degrees Fahrenheit before then restoring the egg back to its liquid form. To do this the chemists added in urea to the egg white, which is one of the main substances found in urine. This untangles the knots in the proteins as it breaks them down chemically. When that process has finished the resulting solution is poured into a Vortex Fluid Device, and this pieces the white's broken proteins into an untangled form within 5 minutes.
The critical element here is the option to produce results within a short period of time. This has meant that a lot of time has been shaved off the methods that have been previously tested for reconstituting proteins. In the past this has taken several days. Now the scientists are patenting the method and they believe that it can be used in different applications, including production of cancer drugs.
