Thank you for concise explanation :). I guess that I must have overestimated the macroscopic change following denaturation. Hypothetical question: to my understanding MRI machines are calibrated to resonate with water molecules (hence the reason behind these darker areas on the picture you showed would be "because they contain more fat molecules than water, there would be lesser presence of water and less signal would be registered back"). Assuming that we could rehydrate the sample to its former state (or perhaps do so selectively to some type of interesting structures, but I don't think it's a viable method) and also assuming that water concentration in the gel itself would be isotropic, is there anything useful that we could learn resulting from using MRI on the enlarged sample?