Jenny Graves wins Australia's $250,000 prime minister's prize for science

Graves' groundbreaking genetic work includes the 'throwaway line' that the male Y chromosome may one day go extinct

Jenny Graves transformed our understanding of how sex chromosomes work, and led to the realisation that the human male Y chromosome may be on a path to extinction. For that and a slew of other groundbreaking work, Graves has been awarded Australia's top science prize.

Graves, now at La Trobe University, helped pioneered the field of "comparative genomics", where the function of different parts of genomes are compared between species, in order to understand how they have evolved - and how they continue to evolve.