Cockroach Milk Packs 3 Times the Energy of Dairy, and Its Ig Nobel Crystals Now Inspire Protein Design

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ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT | AFP via Getty Images Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Pocket Ten years after headlines floated cockroach milk as the next superfood, the science behind it has won an award, and one of its authors is talking about something other than breakfast.

The 11 scientists who decoded the protein crystals a cockroach uses to feed its unborn young were honored with the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Sept. 3 in Zurich. Their 2016 study estimated that a single crystal holds more than three times the energy of an equal mass of dairy milk. Now, the lab that led the work is looking at what the crystal’s unusually stable structure could teach scientists about building new proteins.

The Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, is the only known viviparous cockroach, meaning it nourishes embryos inside its body, much as mammals do. Its eggs carry little yolk. Instead, the wall of the mother’s brood sac secretes a protein-rich liquid that the developing embryos drink.

Once inside an embryo’s gut, that liquid forms crystals. In the study in IUCrJ, published online June 27, 2016, an international team led by first author Sanchari Banerjee and corresponding author Subramanian Ramaswamy used X-ray crystallography to map those crystals in atomic detail.

The crystals measured up to about 30 micrometers long, far smaller than a grain of salt. The best of them revealed their structure at 1.2 angstroms, a resolution high enough to see individual atoms. That structure is now archived in the Protein Data Bank.

What the team found was strange by crystallography standards. Crystals are normally built from identical repeating units. These were packed with a mix of closely related milk proteins carrying different sugars and fats, likely linoleic or oleic acid, yet they still produced sharp, high-resolution data. The researchers described the crystalline form as giving embryos access to a constant supply of complete nutrients: protein, carbohydrate and fat.

The figure that launched a wave of “superfood” stories came from the paper itself: one crystal contains more than three times the energy of an equivalent mass of dairy milk. That comparison is by weight, and each crystal is microscopic.

Getting the crystals also meant dissection. The researchers gently pushed embryos out of the brood sac of a pregnant female and isolated the embryos’ midguts to collect them. That is a long way from anything resembling a carton on a grocery shelf.

For the cockroach, though, the payoff is clear. The paper notes earlier research showing a 60-fold increase in an embryo’s protein during development. Young D. punctata reach reproductive maturity in roughly 43 to 52 days, compared with about 160 days for the Madeira cockroach, Rhyparobia maderae, whose embryos develop in a brood sac but are not fed milk. The authors suggested the crystals’ energy density might help explain the difference.

According to a Purdue University announcement, the work began about 25 years ago, when Nathan Coussens, then an undergraduate in Ramaswamy’s lab, had a hunch the crystals were more than waste. An X-ray beam showed, to everyone’s surprise, that they were proteins. Determining the full atomic structure took more than a decade.

Three of the 11 honored co-authors attended the ceremony: Ramaswamy, now a professor of biological sciences at Purdue; Leonard Chavas, now with the detector company DECTRIS Japan; and Coussens, who directs the In Vitro Evaluation and Molecular Pharmacology Laboratories at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which is operated for the National Cancer Institute. The official citation honors the discovery that the cockroach’s milk proteins contain about three times as much energy as cow milk proteins.

None of the research tested cockroach milk as human food, and no study has shown it is safe or beneficial to eat. It is not produced commercially, and the only collection method described in the paper required dissecting embryos.

There is also a well-documented reason for caution around cockroach proteins in general. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences lists cockroaches as a source of indoor allergens and notes that researchers have linked cockroach presence to more severe asthma symptoms. The milk crystals themselves have not been studied as allergens, but any food made from them would need safety testing first.

The more practical legacy may lie in the crystal’s architecture. Purdue says the protein framework identified in the cockroach work is exceptionally stable, making it an intriguing starting point for designing proteins with new functions. Ramaswamy’s current research includes work that combines artificial intelligence with protein engineering.

“You start with one question, and years later you realize there are entirely new questions and possibilities that came from that discovery,” Ramaswamy said in the Purdue release.

Chavas took a different lesson from the crystals. He said that watching nature build such dense, stable protein crystals inside a living animal inspired him to spend the past decade setting up and running specialized platforms in France and Japan for growing crystals inside living cells.

Those applications remain early, and Purdue has not described any product or clinical use. For now, the cockroach crystals are a lesson in how nature packs nutrition, not a menu item.

It is a protein-rich fluid that the Pacific beetle cockroach secretes to feed embryos inside its body. Once swallowed, it forms crystals in the embryos’ guts.

Is it really three times more nutritious than cow’s milk?

The 2016 study estimated that one crystal holds more than three times the energy of the same mass of dairy milk. That is an energy comparison by weight, not a test of human nutrition.

There is no evidence it is safe or beneficial for people, and it is not commercially produced. Collecting it for the study required dissecting embryos.

Who won the Ig Nobel Prize for this research?

All 11 authors of the 2016 paper were honored with the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Three of them attended the ceremony in Zurich.

What are scientists doing with the discovery now?

Ramaswamy’s lab at Purdue sees the unusually stable protein framework as a starting point for designing new proteins, including with AI tools. The work is at an early research stage.