Avena Origins and Futures: Workshop Introduction and Summary

The oat research community is one of the oldest organized crop-specific research communities. We benefit from strong support from the milling industry, and there is a strong international collaborative spirit among both public and private oat researchers. Workshops such as this are important opportunities for oat researchers to share ideas and meet new colleagues. Here, our oat research economies are strengthened by ‘free trade of ideas’, and there is no room for ‘isolationism’ or ‘fake news’. Beyond this workshop, we have a wealth of tools to support collaboration and sharing. Among these are the new re-invigorated Oat Newsletter (http://oatnews.org), a new international oat advocacy organization called Oat Global (http://oatglobal.org), and a new Oat Rust Initiative to tackle oat’s worst adversary (https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/oat-rust-initiative/). The sharing and integration of oat data is supported by the GrainGenes system (https://wheat.pw.usda.gov/GG3/) as well as by the T3/Oat database, which now houses a large collection of linked genotype/phenotype data (https://triticeaetoolbox.org/oat/). In recent years, a major project called the Collaborative Oat Research Enterprise (CORE) was completed, providing sequences, marker platforms, an oat consensus map, and information about populations and QTL. You can find a summary of the CORE work and its impact in the Oat Newsletter (https://oatnews.org/oatnews_pdfs/2016/oatnews_2016_tinker.pdf). The International Oat Conference was held this year in St. Petersburg Russia, and the next will be held in Perth Australia in October 2020. In 2018, the American Oat Workers conference will be held in Seattle USA. In this session, three speakers will give talks on progress and applications in oat genomics, and one speaker will introduce us to new genomics work in the oat crown rust pathogen. Following this, two speakers will summarize some current genome-related activities in the oat community. With a strong community, energetic new researchers, complete oat genome sequences on the near horizon, and with all the ideas and technologies shared at this PAG conference, the next few years will bring exciting discoveries and opportunities to oat.