Cultivated oat (Avena sativa L.) is an old crop thought to have been domesticated over 3,000 years ago, while growing as a weed in wheat and barley fields. Oat has a low carbon footprint, substantial health benefits and the potential to replace animal-based food products. However, lack of genome resources has prevented the application modern methods of plant breeding. An international research team, including researchers from IPK Leibniz Institute, now presents a high-quality reference genome of A. sativa and its most closely related wild relatives. This resource for the Avena genus will help leverage knowledge from other cereal genomes, improve our understanding of basic oat biology and accelerate genomics-assisted breeding.
