... your place for oat information.

(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:

Deer really do like oats – and they’re picky. Turns out other animals do, too, as George Fedak can attest. The same could be said for little boys, and Janet Hainstock has written a lovely story about one little boy’s love of oats.

The next “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinar will be held on Thursday, February 18th, at 11:00 am Eastern time (Canada/USA). Taner Sen (USDA-ARS, USA) and Victoria Blake (Montana State University, USA) will talk to us about “GrainGenes: A Curated and Functional Global Web Resource for Small Grains".

The next “Speaking of Oats…” webinar, “The T3 Database and Applications to Oats”, will be held Thursday, January 21st at 11:00 am EST. This will be presented by Jean-Luc Jannink, Clay Birkett, and David Waring (USDA-ARS and/or Cornell U., USA).

The video recording from December's "Speaking of Oats..." (SOO) webinar is now available on YouTube.

Many thanks to Stephen Harrison, Mónica Mathias, and Liliana Wehrhahne for describing how and why oats are grown in Chile and Argentina, and how the International Oat Nursery works to help oat breeders there and around the world. Thank you also to Eric DeBlieck and Jim Bradeen for being our hosts.

In last week’s “Speaking of Oats…” (SOO) webinar, Steve Harrison pointed out that white tailed deer quite like grazing on oats, and are, in fact, very picky about the variety they choose! The video from this talk, which features Steve, Monica Mathias, and Liliane Wehrhahne speaking about the International Oat Nursery, will be uploaded soon.