This update brings you lots of bits of news gleaned from the web. Firstly, my latest “Harvested from the Web” compilation (covering Jan. – Mar. 2018) is in the “Community news” section.

On the PAG XXVI website you can find slides from all of this years' presentations, including those made during the oat workshop. For example, Nick Sirijovski presented the work being done at Lund University to sequence the hexaploid oat genome. Two news stories concerning this work are included in the “web harvest” mentioned above, and a short description of the project is also on the ScanOats website.

ScanOats has updated its newsletter twice recently. You can find issue 4 here and issue 5 here. Please note that ScanOats' 1st workshop will be held in Lund, Sweden, on May 2nd, 2018. Also, there is a mention of the latest paper by Yong-Bi Fu on oat genome evolution, a summary of which also appears as a report in our ”Research Reports” section.

POGA’s March, 2018 “Oat Scoop” newsletter is now available as well. They also post individual stories regularly on their website.

In other news, congratulations are due to both Sarah Carlson and Melania Figueroa! Sarah was recently honoured for her work with the Practical Farmers of Iowa, and Melania received a $499,000 grant for her work at the University of Minnesota examining “the contributions of sexual recombination, mutation, and other factors to the extreme variability and rapid virulence evolution of P. coronata f. sp. avenae”, the causal agent of crown rust in oats.

To hear about the work on oats being done at IBERS, have a listen to this interview on BBC Radio Wales with Catherine Howarth (and learn how to pronounce “Aberystwyth” properly at the same time!). Please note, though, that the recording is only available for a short time.

Lastly, and of particular interest to people like Catherine and other geneticists and breeders, Kansas State U. and Cornell U. have just released a new app designed to facilitate the use of barcodes for managing samples and seed stocks. The brochure is here, and more information about the larger project can be found here.