Leonard Chavas, formerly a professor at the Nagoya University Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, was part of an international research group that received the Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry. The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates research that “makes people laugh, then think.”
The researchers discovered that cockroach milk contains three times the energy of dairy milk, with the findings reported in a co-authored paper titled “Structure of a heterogeneous, glycosylated, lipid-bound, in vivo-grown protein crystal at atomic resolution from the viviparous cockroach Diploptera punctata.”
The project began as a series of crystal structure analysis experiments conducted at the Photon Factory (BL1A, etc.) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) located in Tsukuba, Japan. The research was highly praised for its use of cutting-edge synchrotron radiation X-ray technology to elucidate the three-dimensional structure of protein crystals that form inside embryonic cockroaches, and for discovering that the crystals are nutrient-rich, containing a high concentration of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates.
When Chavas was employed at Nagoya University, he conducted further experiments at the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NUSR BL2S1) and the Aichi Synchrotron Radiation Center (AichiSR) which contributed to the continued development of the project.
