Unboiling eggs opens door to cancer cure

To re-create lysozyme, experts used urea to destroy egg’s white

Scientists have invented a way to unboil a hen egg and claim that the new method could dramatically slash costs for cancer treatments and speed up biotechnology research related to proteins.

Researchers from University of California, Irvine and Australian chemists figured out how to unboil egg whites.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” said Gregory Weiss, UCI pro- fessor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry.

“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,” Weiss said.

To re-create a clear protein known as lysozyme once an egg has been boiled, Weiss and his colleagues add a urea substance that chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material.

That is half the process; at the molecular level, protein bits are still balled up into unusable masses.

The scientists then employ a vortex fluid device, a highpowered machine designed by Professor Colin Raston’s laboratory at South Australia’s Flinders University.

Shear stress within thin, microfluidic films is applied to those tiny pieces, forcing them back into untangled, proper form.

Weiss said: “It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs; that’s just demonstrating how powerful this process is.”

“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,” he said.

“This method could trans- form industrial and research production of proteins,” experts said. For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable, researchers said.