... your place for oat information.

April 25th is quite a solemn day for those of you in Australia and New Zealand, being Anzac Day. In ancient Rome, however, that was when people celebrated the festival of Robigalia, dedicated to the preservation of cereal crops from rust and other diseases.

It's time to start making arrangements to attend the International Oat Conference in Chile this November! People already on the IOC list recently received an update on the preparations from Claudia Acosta. The information from that update has been posted on the newsletter's IOC page.

Happy New Year! As mentioned in the last update, the “Speaking of Oats…” webinar series is back, and the next one will be held on Tuesday, January 20th, at 11:00 am EST (UTC -5).

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".

The kick-off webinar for OAT 2026, the 12th International Oat Conference, will be held on Thursday, November 27th, at 11:00 Chilean time (GMT-3). The link to the webinar (being held on YouTube) is here. You can check the time offset for your location at World Time Buddy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.