Scientists Determine New Way To Untangle Proteins By Unboiling an Egg 155
An anonymous reader sends word of this biotech breakthrough. "Univ. of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites—an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published in ChemBioChem. 'Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,' said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor 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 min at 90 C and return a key protein in the egg to working order.'"
Wow .... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's pretty cool.
Imagine, a seasoning which turned your tough steak back from being shoe leather. :-P
Un-boiling an egg, the mind boggles.
I wonder what wacky applications chefs will come up with for this one. I can see some of the molecular gastronomy folks doing some odd things.
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Sadly if you RTF[A/S] they say:
We start with egg whites boiled for 20 min at 90 C and return a key protein in the egg to working order.
One key protein does not make an egg.
Re:Wow .... (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly if you RTF[A/S] they say:
We start with egg whites boiled for 20 min at 90 C and return a key protein in the egg to working order.
One key protein does not make an egg.
And we can be thankful for that! Otherwise we'd end up having brunch with some asshat who wants his eggs "unboiled three minutes, served with bearnaise sauce on the side and two slices of sour dough bread toasted to be crisp but not darkened"... and you end up wondering are they going to spit in everyone's food or just his?
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Re:Wow .... (Score:4, Funny)
Un-boiling an egg, the mind boggles.
I read the article, and still can't figure out what they are really doing or how they are really gonna use it, seems to be a processing technique more than a production technique. Somehow I suspect the unboiled whites are not quite the same as the original.
I guess the next step is to un-fry a chicken.
Re:Wow .... (Score:5, Funny)
There's a particular Wendy's that I won't eat at; they seem to have mastered this technique based on what I've been served between two pieces of bread.
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Sounds like the grille at the KFC wasn't hot, so all you got was the carbon-buildup rubbed on to the outside of the already-cooked meat.
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steak from the oven, finish on the pan, or vice versa. medium rare, no grey band, and dragging a fork across the crust sounded like dragging a fork across a brick.
maybe the crust was a bit too crunchy but hey, it was delicious.
Re:Wow .... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.
Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)
Re:Wow .... (Score:4, Informative)
From what I gathered from the article, a particular cancer medication needs to be produced using expensive materials (hamster ovaries) because the proteins produced by the ovaries don't get tangled up for some reason. Producing those proteins in a less expensive material (E. coli, yeast) would lead to tangling of the proteins. If they can use the less expensive material and detangle the proteins for less than the cost of producing the proteins in the hamster ovaries, the price of the medication would (hopefully) go down and the supply would increase.
So the next step is to un-tangle proteins produced from yeast, I guess.
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So there's money to be made breeding hamsters for their ovaries?
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Dang, we'll outsource anything.
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I read the article, and still can't figure out what they are really doing or how they are really gonna use it ...
The article says quite clearly: The scientific problem they're solving has to do with recovering proteins from test tubes in the lab.
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Same here. From the article, I cannot even be sure they can remotely do what the headline implies.
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Unless you're unfrying four fried chickens, I'm not interested.
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I can see some of the molecular gastronomy folks doing some odd things.
Perhaps, but given the possible sources of the acid used, I'm going to avoid eating an egg treated with it.
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Imagine, a seasoning which turned your tough steak back from being shoe leather.
I wonder what wacky applications chefs will come up with for this one. I can see some of the molecular gastronomy folks doing some odd things.
From the article: "he and his colleagues add a urea substance that chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material." I'm sure if you send that overdone steak back to the kitchen, the chef would be happy to apply the finest urea available to remedy the situation.
But actually, the process won't return the steak back to uncooked meat, it would turn the steak back to protein soup.
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It would be an interesting way to eat a "raw" egg without having to worry about salmonella.
Not really that interesting since pasteurized eggs [safeeggs.com] are already available for sale and relatively easy to find.
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Yep, boiling the raw egg in urea would probably turn the Salmonella into harmless bits.
Your GI track, not so much.....
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It would be an interesting way to eat a "raw" egg without having to worry about salmonella.
I eat raw eggs without worrying about salmonella.
I get my eggs from these guys: http://www.phoenixseggfarm.com... [phoenixseggfarm.com]
If your egg supply is infected, you should change egg supplier. Those eggs cost more, but they don't make me ill.
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At the bottom of website you posted:
The FDA now requires that eggs must be packaged and refrigerated within 36 hours. We exceed these newest standards. This minimizes Salmonella from growing in or on the eggs. One should assume, most raw foods may have some level of bacteria and as usual we advise that all eggs be properly cooked to a temperature of 165F to ensure destruction of any Salmonella and to wash hands with soap after handling eggs. After all we do live in a world of microbes.
Eat safely,
Phoenix's Egg Farm
That kinda contradicts your statement.
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At the bottom of website you posted:
The FDA now requires that eggs must be packaged and refrigerated within 36 hours. We exceed these newest standards. This minimizes Salmonella from growing in or on the eggs. One should assume, most raw foods may have some level of bacteria and as usual we advise that all eggs be properly cooked to a temperature of 165F to ensure destruction of any Salmonella and to wash hands with soap after handling eggs. After all we do live in a world of microbes.
Eat safely,
Phoenix's Egg Farm
That kinda contradicts your statement.
No. It suggests a lawyer told them to put that there to cover their arses.
I've been eating their eggs for some years, because I understand their farming practices are sound, so there is a substantially lower risk of salmonella poisoning than from other supplies.
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Sugar in high enough concentration is toxic to bacteria and humans alike.
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So go ahead and eat nasty overcooked eggs. Your loss.
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Ever seen century eggs [wikipedia.org]?
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Or you could just vaccinate your chickens against salmonella (as the U.K. does for example) and stop worrying about it. If you get salmonella from an egg in the U.K. you have eaten something with cheap nasty foreign eggs.
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Urea is involved in the protein untangling...that would probably make for some scary gastronomy.
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It certainly gives new meaning to "fry until golden". ;-)
Re:Wow .... (Score:5, Funny)
Un-boiling an egg, the mind boggles.
Yes, but if these researchers think they're so darn smart, let's see 'em put toothpaste back into the tube...
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How do you think the toothpaste gets into the tube in the first place ;-) OK, a nozzle to put toothpaste back inside would find it hard to re-create the stripes.
Here's an overview of toothpaste manufacturer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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they probably use a strong friggin detergent to untangle everything too. which ingesting might be... you know, terrible for your insides.
Cryptography is lost (Score:5, Funny)
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Cars made of memory metals will spoil that one, too. Heat the wreckage to the right temperature, and have it spring back into a car.
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Fire makes everything better.
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Besides, like brute-force crypto, in some instances it may be possible to un-boil some aspect of the egg, but it appears to be an extremely expensive process carried out by only highly trained professionals and only workable in very specific circumstances, so it's very unlikely that it'll be commonplace in the total number of instances of boiled eggs or encrypted data.
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Yeah, getting stoned from scrambled eggs sounded too good to be true.
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Yeah, getting stoned from scrambled eggs sounded too good to be true.
Especially while listening to urea heap.
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They've unboiled an egg. They haven't unscrambled one.
Hamster Ovaries (Score:5, Funny)
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Today I learned that cancer antibodies are often made in hamster ovaries. This may be, to date, the most I have ever thought about hamster ovaries since my last sexual encounter
FTFY
Re:Hamster Ovaries (Score:5, Funny)
This may be, to date, the most I have ever thought about hamster ovaries.
Your xHamster browsing history says otherwise.
This is awesome (Score:3)
Unboil a hen egg? (Score:5, Funny)
'Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,
Let me know when they can unboil a rooster egg. Now that will be something.
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If your rooster is laying eggs you've got far bigger problems than them being boiled. ;)
Yes they should have said chicken egg, not hen's egg.
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That's easy. Find me an egg-laying rooster and I'll not only un-boil its eggs, but un-scramble them as well.
oven baked? (Score:2)
Reminds me of the chips that say "Oven Baked" on them. Let me know when they bake chips without an oven.
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Regular chips are fried, not baked.
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think u missed the point of my post. but, very interesting point you make. chips are fried. hmmmm.
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Indeed I did.
'Oven baked' is by and large a pleonasm and in that sense, you were right.
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Cool word. I think I will speak in pleonasms all day, just so I can use that word when people comment!
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If they thought it would sell chips I'm sure they'd find a way.
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Now I'm going to have to invent sun-baked potato chips, just to prove a point. And make a fortune on the marketing gimmick. I shall call them Sun Chips. No, wait ...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:im sure the academic notes are riveting. (Score:4, Informative)
the flatulence is unbearable (worse than the 2002 methane leak...)
Methane is odourless. Egg farts stink because of the hydrogen sulfide and similar compounds.
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entropy anyone? (Score:2)
Boiled at 90C? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is their lab at the bottom of death valley or are they using a pressure cooker?
Every time C vs F comes up, the C fans invariably point to C being vastly superior mainly because 100 C is water's boiling point.
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Higher pressure increases boiling point. And while metric is superior for most things, the Celsius scale is just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit.
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Why not water at the average saltiness of the ocean? To complicated
1) It's a lot easier to produce "pure" water than it is to adjust the salt content of water to match the average
2) There is more variation than you would think in the saltiness of the ocean - which would require a lot of sampling, and as we did more sampling, the scale would change, or it would b
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I think that should say 68F. At least the phase changes of water are relatively objective.
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Why water?
Because it's everywhere, and it also can be measured to derive other units, like the Cubic Metre (or its more common non-SI derivative, the Litre).
Why not salt water at ocean-average saltiness?
Because then you need a way of accounting for the concentration of salt and anything else that might be present in your water sample, where as pure water can be obtained via distillation.
Why sea level?
Because its easy to account for without various a
Re:Boiled at 90C? (Score:4, Insightful)
0 is the freezing point and 100 is the boiling point at normal pressure. How is that arbitrary?
LOL. Let me help you:
1. the freezing point (arbitrary but easily observable state)
2. of pure water with no dissolved substances (arbitrary but common chemical compound)
3. at sea level (arbitrary but easily located place)
4. at normal atmospheric pressure
5. on earth (arbitrary but very convenient location)
6. is 0 degrees (arbitrary value which kind of makes sense until you realize that you can still get colder)
7. and the boiling point of water at sea level on earth at normal atmospheric pressure (previous comments still apply)
8. is 100 degrees (arbitrary number chosen for convenience of the units - "10" would be too course grained and "1000" would be too fine grained)
So, yes, the celsius scale is arbitrary, the Fahrenheit only slightly more so. At least the celsius scale can be kind of reproduced in a pinch if you're at sea level and normal pressure and you have water and the ability to freeze and heat it. But, then, if you have all that you can reproduce the Fahrenheit scale, too.
For an idea of a less arbitrary scale look at the Kelvin scale. On it, "0" is the absolute lowest temperature where matter has absolutely no heat content. Of course the scale is the same as celsius so it still ends up being arbitrary in scale, which *any* temperature scale will be. But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.
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Celsius is only arbitrary if you ignore the fact that it's anchored to two immediately useful temperature for most people in most places.
Remembers the freezing point and boiling point of water in Kelvin would suck just as much as it does in Fahrenheit. When I've doing physics calculations, I'll use Kelvin, where it's the logical unit leading to the simplest form of equation.
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Celsius is only arbitrary if you ignore the fact that it's anchored to two immediately useful temperature for most people in most places.
Sigh. Please read my post repeatedly until you get it. I never said that "0" and "100" celsius aren't "useful", just that it's entirely arbitrary. Also note that it won't work in "most places" - it only works at sea level at normal atmospheric pressure for pure water. Anything other than that is slightly off.
Remembers the freezing point and boiling point of water in Kelvin would suck just as much as it does in Fahrenheit. When I've doing physics calculations, I'll use Kelvin, where it's the logical unit leading to the simplest form of equation.
Which again supports my point. For real world use there's little difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit for people who use them. That celsius is based on properties of one chemical compound (ou
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>Which again supports my point. For real world use there's little difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit for people who use them. That celsius is based on properties of one chemical compound (out of millions of compounds) really doesn't make it more useful for anything.
I cook with water every day.Stop pretending the boiling point of mercury is just a relevant to most people. It isn't.
212 isn't a big round number. 100 is.
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I cook with water every day.Stop pretending the boiling point of mercury is just a relevant to most people. It isn't.
212 isn't a big round number. 100 is.
Great. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook?
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It's a pretty central fact to cooking. If water boiled at 385 Kelvin, we'd have made 100C = 385K.
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It's a pretty central fact to cooking.
Okay. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook? Let me state this another way. Imagine that the inventor of the Celsius scale arbitrarily decided that the boiling point of water would be 1000C. What would you do differently when cooking?
In case you're scratching your head trying to figure out my awesome brain-bender the answer is "nothing".
If water boiled at 385 Kelvin, we'd have made 100C = 385K.
Okay. So? All arbitrary numbers. Like 32 and 212.
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OTOH, air pressure at sea level is a variable which can change significantly in even a short period of time. Still, dramatic changes don't happen, but it's better to measure it in .... sorry, I should be metric, but I only think in PSI (pounds / square inch).
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"For an idea of a less arbitrary scale look at the Kelvin scale. On it, "0" is the absolute lowest temperature where matter has absolutely no heat content. "
It's worse than you think. 0K is currently defined as either 273.16 or 273.15 Kelvins less than the triple point of water. Previously it was defined as a mathematical extrapolation of the ideal gas law.
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But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.
Well, sort of. There's also the Rankine scale. On it, 0 is also the absolute lowest temperature (0K = 0R), but the units are the same size as Fahrenheit degrees.
The only place I've seen it used is in old rocket propulsion texts and similar non-SI thermodynamics stuff.
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How is it any less arbitrary than 32 is the freezing point and 212 is the boiling point at normal pressure? The both just (arbitrarily) assign values to specific events.
Hard-cooked eggs shouldn't be in boiling water (Score:4, Insightful)
Hard-cooked and soft-cooked eggs should be cooked in water just below boiling. Quoting the best selling cookbook in history, Betty Crocker's Cookbook:
2. Heat to boiling in saucepan; REMOVE FROM HEAT. Cover and let stand 18 minutes. Immediately cool briefly in cold water to prevent further cooking. Tap egg to crack shell; roll egg between hands to loosen shell, then peel.
(emphasis mine)
If you keep the water boiling, you get that nasty green film and the albumen becomes rubbery.
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I keep the water boiling. Never seen anything green. Rubbery .. yes.
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Is their lab at the bottom of death valley or are they using a pressure cooker?
Every time C vs F comes up, the C fans invariably point to C being vastly superior mainly because 100 C is water's boiling point.
"Boiling an egg" really means "heating it in hot water to cause the yolk and albumen to solidify". That can be done at a temperature far below the boiling point of water. This is good because in the summer local news stations can show how hot it is outside because you can "fry an egg on the sidewalk!" complete with a demonstration.
If I remember correctly 120F is the temperature needed. I used to make a custard ice cream which included a dozen uncooked egg yolks that couldn't be congealed. In order to ac
Second link has little to do with the posted topic (Score:2)
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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... [wiley.com]
undead (Score:3, Funny)
So they can restore the denaturated proteins to their original state... which basically is a step towards reviving the dead, however weird that sounds.... Undead chickens will take over.
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reviving the boiled. sounds very medieval.
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Why did the zombie chicken cross the road?
Graaaaaaaaiiinnnnss!
Wait (Score:1)
Couldn't you just have the chicken eat the egg and just lay a new one?
Correct paper link (Score:5, Informative)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... [wiley.com]
But ... (Score:2)
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Probably not. Your toast, besides having changes in its protein structures, has other physical changes that still can't be undone - we can't convert caramelized sugar back into it's regular form because a portion of that sugar has burned to carbon (part of what forms the color of the toasted bread), the fats burns, as do, actually, some of the proteins.
But this research does show what could be achieved with judicious use of nanotechnology - perhaps burnt areas could be classified, their carbon atoms mapped,
Lysozome used for a reason (Score:2)
Lysozyme is a very robust protein found in hen egg whites. This process is going to be VERY difficult to apply to other proteins.
Even with purified lysozyme, you can boil it for extended amounts of time and it will refold on it's own just fine... in very short time scales. You can lyophilize it down to a powder, store it for years, add water... and it will refold and be active. (Lysozyme is an enzyme that degrades bacterial cell walls.)
In related news.. (Score:2)
Humpty-Dumpty reported to be put back together again.
Next up: (Score:2)
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No. The digestive process breaks protein down into amino acids. The process described here is meant to keep the protein intact.