Happy 2025! It’s time to open another volume of "Research Reports". In volume 61, we had eight articles, as well as links to the recording from one "Speaking of Oats" webinar and links to the abstracts from the 2024 American Oat Workers' Conference (AOWC). Please send your submissions for volume 62 to oatnewsletter@gmail.com. Submissions or ideas for other sections of the newsletter are also welcome and should be sent to the same address.

The "Research Reports" volumes were expanded a while ago to include plain-language summaries of published articles, but not everyone chooses to submit one. If I see mention of your article elsewhere, I will add it to the "Weekly Web Harvest", but summaries are of more value to the community as a whole.

Information about meetings and conferences can also be found in the "Weekly Web Harvest". Conferences with more relevance to the oat community are listed in the calendar (see sidebar and the bottom of each page). The AOWC and International Oat Conference (IOC) have their own pages, of course. There is a new message from the IOC organizing committee on the latter. They are looking for subject matter experts to join various subcommittees. Please help out if you can!

Two other conferences of note have abstract submission deadlines of January 31st! One is the Monogram conference, which, this year, is being hosted by IBERS/Aberystwyth University in Wales. The other is the 2nd CROPDIVA Symposium on "Agrobiodiversity Along the Value Chain", which is being held in Lleida, Spain.

The annual Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG) was held in San Diego, USA, last week. Abstracts from the oats workshop and other oat-related talks and posters are listed here in the "Other Meetings" section of the newsletter.

Two of the talks discussed the PanOat project. The consortium has submitted two papers for publication, both of which are now available as preprints:

• Raz Avni, et al. "A pangenome and pantranscriptome of hexaploid oat"
• Wubishet Bekele, et al. "Global genomic population structure of wild and cultivated oat reveals signatures of chromosome rearrangements"

YuanYing Peng also discussed her group's recent work assembling the genomes of hulless oats and wild relatives. The group's website can be found here. A group at Hebei University in China is also working on oat genomics. Their website is here (note that this site is not secure).

As far as other projects go, participants in the Oat Frontiers project met in person last fall, and have produced this document describing their results. Their website is here.

There are many other projects going on as well. One of them is the regenerative Organic Oats Program in Canada. Another is the Processed Oat Partnership in Australia, which supported a Nuffield Scholarship for Shannen Davies to travel around the world seeking inspiration and collaboration.

Thinking way back to the 1990's, Sandra Milach did her PhD at the University of Minnesota on dwarfing genes in oats. She has now been appointed Chief Scientist of the CGIAR. Someone working on his PhD right now is Anup Dhakal, from the University of Illinois. He was recently identified as a "Rising Seed Star" by Seed World magazine. Congratulations to both!

As has been true since 2014, I find a lot of oat-related news on 'X' (formerly Twitter). However, many people are leaving that platform, and relevant information is becoming harder to find. Some people have switched to using Bluesky, and I have set up an Oat Newsletter account there: @oatnewsletter.bsky.social. Please follow me if you are on that platform! Managing two accounts will not be easy, though, so it would be lovely if more people could send me information directly. Alternatively, someone else could take over control of one or both of the accounts. Please let me know if you would like to take on that challenge!

Recipes using oats are one thing that people are still posting on 'X', and January is also National Oatmeal month in a few places. A few oat recipes are always included in the "Weekly Web Harvest", and there is a "Recipes" section in the newsletter as well.

Many of the recipes come from companies producing oat products, and one of those is Mornflake in England, which is celebrating 350 years in business this year! That's older than most countries.... In Finland, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Elovena brand, and they have opened an online store selling special products for the occasion. Also celebrating are the folks at White's Oats in Northern Ireland, who have been recognised for their exemplary food safety and quality standards for a record 16th year. Congratulations to all!

The Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year or Spring Festival) begins on January 29th, so here's a recipe for something a little different: an oatmeal congee. This year will be the Year of the Snake, which symbolizes wisdom and transformation, offering opportunities for personal growth and change.

Here's to many new and exciting opportunities this year!