Cockroach Milk: Understanding Nature’s Weirdest Superfood
About this episode
It started, as good science often does, with someone noticing something weird. A decade before ‘cockroach milk’ made headlines, a researcher spotted odd, shiny crystals in the gut of a baby cockroach and assumed they were waste – crystals in guts usually are. He was wrong; they turned out to be… protein!
Original research published by:
Original article:
Summary of the paper: ‘Structure of a heterogeneous, glycosylated, lipid-bound, in vivo-grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach Diploptera punctata’, in the International Union of Crystallography Journal, doi.org/10.1107/S2052252516008903
Team members:
Sanchari Banerjee; Subramanian Ramaswamy; Nitish Sathyanarayanan – Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, GKVK Campus, India
Jandhyam Srikanth – Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, GKVK Campus, India
Barbara Stay; Nathan P. Coussens; James S. S. Gray – University of Iowa, USA
François-Xavier Gallat – High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan
Koichiro J. Yagi; Stephen S. Tobe – University of Toronto, Canada
Leonard M. G. Chavas – Accelerator Research Organization, Japan; Experimental Division, Synchrotron SOLEIL, France
Funding:
Government of India
National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS)
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