“When people complain of
your complexity, they fail to remember that they made fun of your simplicity.”
- Michael Bassey Johnson
“Although most cockroaches
don’t actually produce milk, Diploptera punctate, which is the only known
cockroach to give birth to live young, has been shown to pump out a type of
‘milk’ containing protein crystals to feed its babies…what is more fascinating
to researchers is the fact that a single one of these protein crystals contain
more than three times the amount of energy found in an equivalent amount of
buffalo milk (which is also higher in calories than dairy milk)…If you look
into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids," said
Sanchari Banerjee, one of the team…Not only is the milk a dense source of
calories and nutrients, 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 digestion. "If you need food that is calorically high, that is time
released and food that is complete. This is it," said Subramanian
Ramaswamy, who led the project.” Jacinta Bowler with SCIENCE ALERT wrote.
Now the researchers have the sequence, they are hoping to get yeast to produce the crystal in much larger quantities - making it slightly more efficient than extracting
