Scientists at UC Irvine have announced that, working with colleagues from South Australia’s Flinders University, they have developed a way to unboil an egg.
Your first reaction might be “Why?” or even “Who cares” but they say the process has applications that could save thousands of dollars in pharmaceutical production and research.
"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. It's not so much that we're interested in processing the eggs; that's just demonstrating how powerful this process is," Weiss said. "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."
"This method ... could transform industrial and research production of proteins," the researchers write in ChemBioChem.
For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable.
Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck.
UCI has filed for a patent on the work, and its Office of Technology Alliances is working with interested commercial partners.
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