On a hot summer day most of us would love a nice big ice cream cone to cool us off. But, although ice cream is so refreshing it can also be very sticky, which is can be a mess. In the article No More Sticky Mess! Scientists Develop Slower-Melting Ice Cream it was revealed that scientists in the United Kingdom were trying to come up with a way to make ice cream that melts slower than conventional varieties. Some researchers in the United Kingdom from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Dundee discovered that a protein called BsIA that is normally found in biofilm, can be used as an ingredient to help keep ice cream from melting as quickly and to help keep everything in ice cream combined. The new study that was conducted showed that the protein BsIA was responsible for making a hydrophobic coat on the outer surface of the biofilm, which means that it makes an outer layer that pushes back water like a raincoat, the researchers said.…show more content… "In ice cream, the important interfaces are between fat/oil and water, air bubbles and water and the surface of ice crystals," study co-author Cait MacPhee, a professor of biological physics at the University Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email. One of the researchers also said that by "Adding our proteins stabilises all of these, and the combined effect is to slow down the melting” meaning that when they add the protein BsIA to the ingredients in the ice cream it will slow down the melting of it. BsIA also has other potential uses that have yet to have been revealed. Although the researches have added BsIA to some different types of ice cream in experiments they still haven’t test-tasted
