... your place for oat information.

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.

The first International Day of Plant Health will be Thursday, May 12th! One of the events planned is a webinar hosted by the FAO.

We tend to consider oats as being mainly for food or feed purposes, but they’re good for other things as well – like ingredients for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. You can hear more about that at our next “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinar, which will be held on Tuesday, April 26th, at 11:00 am EDT. Cark Maunsell, from Oat Cosmetics in the UK, will be our speaker, and you can register here.

The abstract submission deadline for the International Oat Conference in Perth, Australia, this October has been extended to May 15th.  The abstract templates and instructions for submission are on the OAT2022 website.

Looking forward to hearing about everyone’s work!

The next “Speaking of Oats…” webinar will be held this Thursday, March 17th, at 11:00 am EDT (UTC -4). Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada oat breeder Weikai Yan will be discussing “Mega-environment analysis and breeding for mega-environment specific oat cultivars for Canada”.

How about a "Ta-da!" list? Let’s start with some actual “to do” items first, though.

This is a reminder that our next “Speaking of Oats…” webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 22nd at 5:30 pm (17:30 hr) EST (UTC -5). Allan Rattey, from InterGrain, Australia, will talk to us about “Australian oat breeding at InterGrain: Building upon public-funded breeding successes”. Please register here. As always, you can check the time offset here.

Many meetings continue to be modified or cancelled because of the ongoing COVID-19 situation.  Please continue to check the calendar for updates.  (And let me know if I’ve missed something!)

For those of you interested in organic oat supply chains, Canadian Organic Growers is presenting a webinar that might be of interest this Friday, February 11th, at noon EST (UTC -5). 

To paraphrase Robert Burns, “the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft awry”, and that’s exactly what happened with yesterday’s “Speaking of Oats…” webinar. Interesting that it was also Burns Day!