There are about 80 thousand synthetic industrial compounds that have been made in the last century. That includes everything from plastics to flame retardants to pesticides.

"The problem with industrial compounds is that many of them have structures that are not commonly seen in nature. So, organisms simply have not had a chance to evolve defenses against these compounds."

Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is studying how these compounds move through the environment and ultimately, how they may affect human health. To do this, his lab is looking at the sea urchin.

"This is an organism that has been used for more than 100 years in basic cell and developmental biology researcher and it has a fully sequenced genome so that we can manipulate the drug transporters and study their functions and their interactions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."