Dealing with toxic materials is an ancient problem. Biologist Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says there’s a warfare going on all the time in nature.

"For example, plants often defend themselves against insects that try to eat them by making compounds that are bitter or toxic. And those compounds in turn can be recognized by the defenses that are present in the insect and eliminated and there is this constant warfare where each party in this battle is trying to gain a competitive advantage. Over time, organisms have evolved these very robust defenses against these compounds in the environment."

Hamdoun is looking to the sea urchin to better understand how environmental compounds affect humans.

"It has a fully sequenced genome so that we manipulate and study their functions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."