A single female sea urchin produces lots of eggs – like five to ten million of them. And sea urchin embryos are evolutionarily closely related to man* – more so than fruit flies or worms, which are typically used as model organisms. Because of this, sea urchins are being used to help scientists identify toxic chemicals in the environment.

"Chemical testing is an area of intensive investigation right now. One of the challenges is trying to determine whether a compound is going to be harmful when you don’t actually know what mechanisms it can interact with and how it can potentially cause harm."

So, biologist Amro Hamdoun and his colleagues at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography are systematically searching through the genes in the sea urchin genome to find those involved in drug transporters in humans.

"And by sorting through these genes and cataloging them and understanding what the functions of each of them is, we can begin to make these testable predictions about whether there are these common patterns of pollutant interaction."

*Quick fact: Sea urchins are echinoderms, marine animals that originated more than 540 million years ago. The reason for the great interest in sequencing the sea urchin genome is because it shares a common ancestor with humans. Sea urchins are closer to human and vertebrates from an evolutionary perspective than other more widely studied animal models, such as fruit fly or worms.

Image: fluorescent expression of transporters in sea urchin embryos