How (and why) chemists figured out how to unboil an egg
You can't unscramble an egg. But you can unboil it.
That's what chemists with University of California, Irvine and South Australia’s Flinders University managed to do, and their findings were published last week in the journal ChemBioChem. All it took was a chemical solution and a machine that spins at high speeds.
No, the study wasn't intended to figure out just how to unboil eggs. These aren't precious commodities. If you accidentally boil one, just grab another. Rather, the eggs were used as a proxy for a much more serious endeavor: making cancer research more time and cost efficient.
University of California, Irvine chemistry and molecular biology professor Gregory Weiss wanted to figure out how to refold lab-created proteins associated with cancer. "The problem is when we tried to produce cancer-associated proteins... often times the proteins come out as a jumbled mess," Weiss said. "It kind of looks like boiled eggs... When that happens, we sigh deeply."
It can take days, even weeks, for scientists to tease out those gunked-up proteins that are stuck to the edges of test tubes. Until recently, those proteins were unpacked using dialysis, a method that's been around for more than a century.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/01/28/how-and-why-chemists-figured-out-how-to-unboil-an-egg
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