An international team of scientists has just sequenced a protein crystal located in the midgut of cockroaches¹. The reason?

 

最近，一个国际科学家团队确定了蟑螂中肠内的蛋白质晶体的结构序列。为什么要研究这个？

 

It's more than four times as nutritious³ as cow's milk and, the researchers think it could be the key to feeding our growing population in the future.

 

Although most cockroaches don't actually produce milk, Diploptera punctate, which ‘is the only known cockroach² to give birth to live young, has been shown to pump out a type of milk' containing protein crystals to feed its babies.

 

The fact that an insect produces milk is pretty fascinating - but what fascinated researchers is the fact that a single one of these protein crystals contains more than three times the amount of energy found in an equivalent amount of buffalo⁴ milk (which is also higher in calories then dairy milk).

 

Clearly milking a cockroach isn't the most feasible option, so an international team of scientists headed by researchers from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India decided⁵ to sequence the genes⁶ responsible for producing the milk protein crystals to see if they could somehow replicate⁷ them in the lab.

 

"The crystals are like a complete food - they have proteins, fats and sugars. If you look into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids," said Sanchari Banerjee, one of the team, in an interview with the Times of India.

 

Not only is the milk a dense⁸ source of calories and nutrients⁹, it's also time released. As the protein in the milk is digested, the crystal releases more protein at an equivalent rate to continue the digestion¹⁰.

 

Now the researchers have the sequence, they are hoping to get yeast¹¹ to produce the crystal in much larger quantities- making it slightly more efficient (and less gross) than extracting crystals from cockroach's guts¹².

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