It's our Diamond anniversary!

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Wed, 12/17/2025 - 15:14

The year 2025 marks 75 years since the Oat Newsletter was established! While the first issue was not actually published until February 1st, 1951, it was at the National Oat Conference Committee meeting on November 2nd, 1950, that the Chairman "called upon Neal Jensen of Cornell University to outline his idea for an oat newsletter to be published once a year on the results obtained and observations made by oat breeders of the country".

Don’t PAN-ic!

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Wed, 10/29/2025 - 17:58

No need to panic - the new research reports I’ve long been promising have now been posted! One is a summary of the PanOat pangenome paper just published in Nature that describes the sequencing and annotation of 33 oat genomes, as well as a study of their transcriptomes. A milestone to be sure! The companion paper on global oat diversity among more than 9000 oat lines has also been summarized. Other summaries highlight work done by the group at IBERS and groups led by Igor Loskutov (two articles),Yong-Bi Fu, and Jaswinder Singh.

A word to the wise...

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Wed, 10/01/2025 - 10:59

Please take note that POGA (Prairie Oat Growers Association) is warning potential AGM attendees of a scam involving booking rooms at the hotel where the meeting will be held on December 3rd. More details, plus the full agenda for the meeting and other information, can be found on the AGM webpage.

The "Wayback Machine"

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Sat, 09/20/2025 - 10:59

It is said that once something is on the internet it never goes away, and that seemed to be true recently when someone told me that they had used the "Wayback Machine" to find some information while the newsletter server was down! So, we’re going to go back in time also, to look at more material that, under normal circumstances, would have been posted several months ago.

We're back!

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Thu, 08/14/2025 - 08:37

I'm very pleased to tell you that the Oat Newsletter is back on-line, after the GrainGenes servers were hacked back in May. Many thanks to Steve Michel, Taner Sen, and others at GrainGenes for getting us back up and running! There is still work to be done, however. In particular, the OatMail system is still not functioning. You can send any messages you want shared directly to me at oatnewsletter@gmail.com.

Comfort

Submitted by Charlene Wight on Wed, 03/26/2025 - 13:01

This year has brought much change, and that includes some sad news. Ken Armstrong, a scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Ottawa for 35 years, passed away a few weeks ago. Ken’s speciality was cytogenetics, and, among other things, he was a part of the infamous Quaker Oats Consortium in the 1990s. You can read more about Ken’s legacy in his obituary, which has been added to the “Hall of Fame” section in the newsletter.

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