Prof Speed is a senior bioinformatics researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne and is regarded as a world leader in bioinformatics.
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods for storing, retrieving and analysing biological data.
Prof Speed is touring New Zealand as the 2013 Royal Society of New Zealand Distinguished Speaker, and gave a public lecture at the University of Otago College of Education auditorium on epigenetics this week. Epigenetics involves the study of human epigenomes- the next frontier in human genetics.
Epigenomes were best described as the ''reading instructions'' for DNA and explained why we had blood, nerve, skin and muscle cells when the genetic information in those cells was largely identical, he said.
''If we compare the genome sequence to text, the epigenome is the punctuation which shows how the DNA should be read to create these different types of cells,'' he said.
In his lecture he emphasised the importance of the Human Genome Project - completed after 13 years in 2003 - in laying crucial ground work for more recent epigenetics research.
''I would have very little to talk about'', without that $US1 billion ($NZ1.28 billion) project, he said in an interview.
The project had since delivered ''incredible value''- producing a ''human reference genome'' which was used by scientists all over the world each day, during their research.
Also greatly important was ''the technology that was driven by the project''.
Further advances in that powerful technology developed to undertake the necessary genetic sequencing work meant the genomic analysis was now more than 100,000 times cheaper, and enormously faster.
Work that once took many years could now be done in a matter of days, making further genomic and epigenomic research much more feasible.
