The tenth International Oat Conference, Oats 2016, will be held from July 11th-15th, 2016, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Registration is open, and further details concerning presentation abstracts (due April 1st), accommodation, etc., can be found on the website.

Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) XXIV was held in January, and included a workshop dedicated to oats. Links to the presentations given at the workshop can now be found in the "Other Meetings" section. Oat-related poster abstracts are also listed.

In the aftermath of the Oats2020 meeting last November, the work on avenacins described by Anne Osbourn was picked up by “Farming Futures” in a story called “Avena strigosa: From metabolic gene clusters to genomics”.

Axel Diederichsen, who, as you may recall, was featured in the November issue of POGA’s “Oat Scoop” newsletter, made a video about Avena strigosa a few years ago. He also features in a new video about the Plant Gene Resources of Canada genebank in Saskatoon.

Thinking more about wild oat species, The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew hosts a database of grass species called GrassBase. There will be a meeting discussing this resource in July, just after the Oats 2016 meeting.

Don’t forget that, from time to time, and sometimes without announcement, new events are added to the Upcoming Events listing at the bottom of each page of the Newsletter and links are added to the "Additional Links" page. Please take a look!

There are two new reports in the "Research Reports" section. The first, by Ziya Dumlupinar, et al., describes the genotyping of oat accessions from Turkey. The second, by me, contains photos of the pests and diseases in last year's hill plots in Ottawa.

Lastly, Steve Tanksley was recently awarded the prestigious Japan Prize! Steve was one of the people who helped create the first genetic maps in oat: one from the diploid cross A. atlantica x A. hirtula, and the other from the hexaploid cross A. byzantina ‘Kanota’ x A. sativa ‘Ogle' (using the terminology of the day). Congratulations, Steve!