Today I have more chances for everyone to connect.

In the "Community News" section, Monica Mathias describes her new project on breeding oat varieties for those with celiac disease in Chile. She would love some feedback and collaboration!

On Tuesday, September 8th, DivSeek will be hosting a webinar by Nils Stein from IPK on "Biodiversity informatics to bridge the gap from genome information to educated utilization of genetic diversity hosted in Genebanks". No registration is required, but you must contact me (oatnewsletter@gmail.com) or someone at DivSeek to receive the Zoom invitation.

On October 1st, the 50th anniversary of Plant Gene Resources of Canada will be celebrated with a virtual conference. Details will be available soon!

More events can be found on the calendar, and most of them are virtual. One event that you wouldn’t expect to see on-line is the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championships! This year, the competitors have been asked to send videos of their oatmeal-based creations, and these will be posted on-line on Word Porridge Day, October 10th.

PAG XXIX (International Plant and Animal Genome conference) will be held as usual, but has been postponed until March. That may change again, though, depending on how things go over the next few months.

Since the International Oat Conference has also been postponed, Oat Global (together with the Oat Newsletter) has decided to host a virtual speaker series to bring everyone in the broader oat community together. More about that can be found here. We would like this to be an ongoing series, and are very excited to hear your thoughts and suggestions for speakers!

Another project being coordinated by Oat Global is the Oat Rust Initiative. Crown rust has, of course, been a major concern in parts of the world for many years, and monitoring rust populations is extremely important. The USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Lab in St. Paul, MN, has been doing just that, and the final Cereal Rust Bulletin for 2020 is now available on their website.

Don’t forget that the newsletter is available for everyone to communicate their research findings or other information, whether via text or video! I look forward to hearing from you.