Scientists unboil an egg - Peat relevance

Philomath

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Boiling an egg may seem like the simplest part of breakfast, but it involves some interesting chemistry. An egg is 90 percent water and ten percent protein, which is what gives egg whites their gloppy appearance. These proteins are in the form of long chains of amino acids tangled and folded in upon themselves like microscopic piles of yarn held together by weak atomic bonds. When the egg is dropped into boiling water, the heat breaks these bonds and the chains start to unravel and break. The chains then bond with other amino acids and capture water inside the new folds, causing the whites to turn white and gelatinous. Cook them too long, and the chains curl in on themselves; forcing the water out and turning the whites hard and rubbery.

This is what the UC Irvine team did when they boiled their eggs. In fact, they boiled the heck out them for 20 minutes at 90 degrees C (194 degrees F), so they were very hard indeed. They then set out to reverse the process and turn the hard whites into a clear protein called lysozyme by adding urea, which breaks down the chemical bonds that cause the coagulated chains to misfold on one another. The rather unpalatable liquid mass was then run through a vortex fluid device designed by Professor Colin Raston at South Australia’s Flinders University. This set up shear stresses that caused the chains to untangle into their previous uncooked form.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cbic.201402427/abstract


I thought this was interesting since Dr. Peat talks about egg white proteins and structure, comparing the process to cataracs.

From: The transparency of life: Cataracts as a model of age-related disease
In the case of cataracts, this is clearly the case: Most of the lens becomes drier with age, but at a certain point there is a reversal, and some of the tissue takes up too much water. That’s why I refer to cataracts as a model of age-related disease, rather than as a model of aging. In this sense, I am including them among the inflammatory diseases of aging--colitis, arthritis, and cancer, for example. MRI now can show developing cataracts before they are visible, because of increased water content in the area.

The lens of the eye is a fairly dense, tough, transparent living structure, which can develop opaque areas, cataracts, as a result of old age, poisoning, radiation, disease, or trauma. The varieties of cataract relate to the causes. Most of the oxidative metabolism of the lens is in or near the epithelial layer that surrounds it. Old-age cataracts most often begin in this region.
Anyway, cooking disrupts the mysteriously ordered state of water and proteins that makes them transparent, roughly the way egg-white loses its transparency when it is cooked. I have never heard a convincing explanation for the opacity of cooked egg-white, either, but anything that disrupts the original structuring of the protein-water interaction will destroy the transparency.

I wonder if the tangled proteins that are "untangled/unboiled" in the experiment are similar to the tangled Tau proteins in Alzheimers? I also wonder if the use of Urea would have an untangling effect on those proteins?

Just food for thought and yet another case of Dr. Peat being ahead of the game.
 

Spokey

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That's amazing. There was an article doing the rounds recently about people with gout having less Alzheimer's.
 

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