... your place for oat information.

Life is motion, and we always hope for better things to come. It is with sadness, however, that I tell you of the passing of Herb Ohm. Herb was a plant breeder and geneticist at Purdue University in Indiana, USA, for 41 years! More information concerning his life and work can be found in his obituary in the "Hall of Fame" section.

Three other articles have also been added to the "Hall of Fame". These announce the retirements of Christian Azar, George Fedak, and Pamela Zwer. Åsmund Bjørnstad and Trond Buraas have also retired recently.

There are three time-sensitive items for you today:

When it rains, it pours and there is a lot of information in this update!

Wet conditions, of course, help spread disease, so let’s begin with a reminder that Oluseyi Fajolu at the Cereal Disease lab in St. Paul, MN, is eagerly awaiting this season’s rust samples!

Oluseyi’s request is posted in the "Community News" section, as is the first of the following announcements regarding new positions:

This is a reminder that the next “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinar will be held this Thursday, April 15th, at 2:00 pm Eastern time (EDT - Canada/USA). Please note that this is three hours later than our usual time.

The following message is from Catherine Howarth and Nick Tinker:

"Dear International Oat Community,

As co-chairs of the International Oat Conference (IOC) Committee, we (Catherine Howarth and Nick Tinker) are reaching out to you to update you and request your input.  This will be a long but important message, so we ask you to read it carefully.

(The text below is from an email sent to subscribers on 29 Mar 2021 - you can subscribe to updates at any time by sending an email to oatnewsletter@gmail.com)

"Dear Oat Workers and Friends,

Happy Passover and Happy Holi to everyone celebrating those events!

Below are oat-related events of potential interest in April (well, one starts in March), all of which can be found on the Oat Newsletter calendar (https://oatnews.org/):

The next “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinar, presented by Oat Global, will be held this Thursday, March 18th, at 11:00 am Eastern time (Canada/USA). Please note that most of North America has now switched to Daylight Savings Time.

José Costa (USDA-ARS Crop Production and Protection National Program Leader) and the members of his team will talk to us about “The USDA-ARS Oat Grand Challenge”:

For those of you who do genotyping, I have an urgent request from Jason Fiedler, who runs the USDA-ARS genotyping lab in Fargo, ND.

Illumina, which has been producing the 6K chip many of you are using, has run out of the current 6K beadpool. A decision must now be made about how to move forward, so Jason has set up a survey regarding the various options. A more detailed explanation of those options and a link to the survey can be found here.

First, I’d like to thank everybody who’s been attending the “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinars, as well as all the speakers we've had so far. If you haven’t been able to join us live, recordings of the seminars are available on the SOO page or (in a tidier format) in the Research Report sections for 2020 and 2021. The recording of January’s T3/Oat webinar is now available, along with a transcript of the Q. and A. session.

This is a reminder that the next “Speaking of Oats…” webinar, "GrainGenes: A Curated and Functional Global Web Resource for Small Grains" will be held Thursday, February 18th, at 11:00 am EST. It will be presented by Taner Sen (USDA-ARS, USA) and Victoria Blake (Montana State University, USA).

A number of new events have also been added to the calendar, including these two: