Estelle...

Estelle?

But for now,

Golly, Ester!

Good night, Ester.

As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times.

This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates.

They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled.

Estel, you are simply our Hope.

And with that call, my life would change forever.

This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates.

As a result, they easily escape into our environment.

So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates.

Estelle, tell me you love me or it's over.

And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he's doing.

The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River.

This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates.

Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies.

We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates.

We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety.

Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source.

I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas.

We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants.

So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential.

To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps.

The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor.

We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery.

Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem.