Researchers at the University of California Irvine have discovered a way to unboil an egg. They say their work has no culinary applications but it may benefit various fields including food processing and cancer treatment.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry, molecular biology and biochemistry. His findings were published last week in the journal ChemBioChem.

Weiss and his team successfully returned the whites of a boiled egg to clear, liquid form. The egg had been cooked at 195 degrees for 20 minutes.

When eggs are boiled, protein in the egg white changes from tightly wound individual clumps to long tangled strands. This is why raw egg whites are clear while cooked egg whites appear solid.

UCI researchers reversed the process by adding a chemical that caused the egg white to revert to liquid form. They then used a vortex fluid device, created by Australian scientists, to disentangle the protein strands.

The ability to separate tangled proteins could be hugely beneficial to scientists. Other methods of doing so can take as long as four days. This one takes minutes, according to Weiss.

“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,” Weiss said in a news release.

He hailed the new process as a potential game changer. “It speeds things up by a factor of thousands.”