Towards the nonstick egg: designing fluorous proteins

Anyone who has made scrambled eggs will have had cause to praise the proper ties of Teflon. Teflon's highly chemically inert and nonstick nature derive s from the perfluorinated polymer polytetrafluoroethylene. Perfluorocarbons have unique and valuable physical properties not found in nature. By incor porating fluorine into proteins, it might be possible to produce biological molecules with novel and useful properties.