... your place for oat information.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Let's begin the second part of this update with a word about where I find a lot of the information I share with you. Much of it comes from those I follow as @OatNewsletter on Twitter. I have not noticed much of a change in the type of content I see there since Elon Musk took over the platform; however, I am seeing large gaps in my timeline, which should be chronological. If any of you would like to make sure that I see what you tweet, then please tag me.

Buckle up, people, there’s a lot of news! Let’s begin with some events coming up in the next little while:

October 10th is World Porridge Day. This was set up by the organizers of the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championships in 2009 as a way to support Mary’s Meals, a charity devoted to providing free meals to children in their schools all over the world.

Are you looking for a job? Do you like to learn new things and meet new people? Would you like to win a prize? Do you like answering questions?

The job opening is for a Collections Biologist at Plant Gene Resources of Canada with Axel Diederichsen. The deadline to apply is September 1st!

This update is brought to you by the letters I, O, C, D, L, and S....

First, a new update concerning the IOC (International Oat Conference) in Perth, Australia, this October has been sent around to those of you on their mailing list. If you're not on the list, you can join here or take a look at the IOC website.

Time is moving on, and the absolute, final deadline for submitting abstracts to the International Oat Conference in Perth is July 20th. There are also new bursaries for students who wish to make presentations! More information on that is here and the abstract submission instructions and forms are here.

Quality has always been important when it comes to oats and oat research, and now we should consider oat 'qualitEEE' as well! The 'EEE' stands for 'Engage, Enable, and Evolve'.

Last week, the paper describing the sequencing of the hexaploid oat variety 'Sang', along with accessions of Avena longiglumis and A. insularis, was published in the journal 'Nature'. Congratulations to Nadia Kamal, Nikos Renhuldt, et al., for a fabulous achievement! A plain-language summary of the article was also published in 'Nature'.

We have concrete word now that the new postdoc position in Melania Figueroa’s lab at CSIRO in Australia has been approved! The advertisement has been posted here. The successful applicant "will undertake research in preventing losses in oat production due to the impact of oat crown rust disease". The deadline for applications is June 13th.