A researcher from the University of Western Australia has been awarded this year's Prime Minister's prize for science.

36 year old Professor Ryan Lister has spent the last few years working on epigenetics to determine how to turn genes on and off. Listen Duration: 5 minutes 1 second 5 m Listen Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. UWA's Professor Ryan Lister talks about recieving this year's Prime Minister's prize for science and his research ( Tara De Landgrafft ) Download 2.3 MB

The research has big benefits for medicine, but the same science can also be applied to agriculture and in particular cropping.

Professor Lister says he's very humbled by the award and hopes his research, through the ARC centre for excellence in plant energy biology will help farmers adapt to a changing climate.

"What we're looking at in a number of different ways is understanding, at a molecular level, how plants grow and develop and choose to use their resources in order to survive challenging, harsh conditions and how we might improve them to do that," he said.

"Within the centre, my lab is looking at the aspects of the epigenome within this process and how stressed conditions may alter the epigenome in the plant and potentially how this may allow the plants to have a greater chance of responding to a second perception of the stress if it repeats and if it may even be passed through generations.

"I think we have some exciting possibilities to develop some molecular tools to allow us to go into the plant cell, into the plant genome and deliberately alter these epigenetic signposts where ever we want in order to control gene expression wherever we want to control when a gene is turned on and when a gene is turned off.

"And we might even be able to use this to change gene activity without causing a genetic change which might be a potential way of getting around this perceived issue of genetic modification."