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The year 2025 marks 75 years since the Oat Newsletter was established! While the first issue was not actually published until February 1st, 1951, it was at the National Oat Conference Committee meeting on November 2nd, 1950, that the Chairman "called upon Neal Jensen of Cornell University to outline his idea for an oat newsletter to be published once a year on the results obtained and observations made by oat breeders of the country".

The kick-off webinar for OAT 2026, the 12th International Oat Conference, will be held on Thursday, November 27th, at 11:00 Chilean time (GMT-3). The link to the webinar (being held on YouTube) is here. You can check the time offset for your location at World Time Buddy.

No need to panic - the new research reports I’ve long been promising have now been posted! One is a summary of the PanOat pangenome paper just published in Nature that describes the sequencing and annotation of 33 oat genomes, as well as a study of their transcriptomes. A milestone to be sure! The companion paper on global oat diversity among more than 9000 oat lines has also been summarized. Other summaries highlight work done by the group at IBERS and groups led by Igor Loskutov (two articles),Yong-Bi Fu, and Jaswinder Singh.

Please take note that POGA (Prairie Oat Growers Association) is warning potential AGM attendees of a scam involving booking rooms at the hotel where the meeting will be held on December 3rd. More details, plus the full agenda for the meeting and other information, can be found on the AGM webpage.

It is said that once something is on the internet it never goes away, and that seemed to be true recently when someone told me that they had used the "Wayback Machine" to find some information while the newsletter server was down! So, we’re going to go back in time also, to look at more material that, under normal circumstances, would have been posted several months ago.

I'm very pleased to tell you that the Oat Newsletter is back on-line, after the GrainGenes servers were hacked back in May. Many thanks to Steve Michel, Taner Sen, and others at GrainGenes for getting us back up and running! There is still work to be done, however. In particular, the OatMail system is still not functioning. You can send any messages you want shared directly to me at oatnewsletter@gmail.com.

This year has brought much change, and that includes some sad news. Ken Armstrong, a scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Ottawa for 35 years, passed away a few weeks ago. Ken’s speciality was cytogenetics, and, among other things, he was a part of the infamous Quaker Oats Consortium in the 1990s. You can read more about Ken’s legacy in his obituary, which has been added to the “Hall of Fame” section in the newsletter.

Happy 2025! It’s time to open another volume of "Research Reports". In volume 61, we had eight articles, as well as links to the recording from one "Speaking of Oats" webinar and links to the abstracts from the 2024 American Oat Workers' Conference (AOWC). Please send your submissions for volume 62 to oatnewsletter@gmail.com.

"...is some black oat groats", or so the song goes (not really). Alexander Rybalka, from Ukraine, is seeking oats with back caryopses. Not black hulls; black caryopses (groats). If you know of any, please get in touch with him. Details are in this article.

Happy World Porridge Day! The tenth of October was designated World Porridge Day to celebrate the wonders of oatmeal and help raise funds for the charity Mary's Meals.