ABSTRACT
Common oat (Avena sativa, 2n = 6x = 42) has been steadily declining in harvested acreage across much of its traditional cultivation range, in spite of the crop’s tremendous health benefits. Wild and primitive domesticated genetic resources in Avena – including taxa at lower ploidy levels – represent esoteric opportunities to produce novel, innovative oat crops and products to stem this tide. Creative approaches for exploiting these resources will first require deconvolution of cryptic genotypic variation in exotic and elite germplasm. Through access to this knowledge, which is rapidly being accumulated by genome scientists, oat breeders will be able to refine improvement processes involving wide hybridization and introgression for a variety of traits, both single-gene and complex; domestication of wild and improvement of primitive domesticated taxa, especially the highly variable and stress-tolerant A-genome diploids; and creation of novel synthetic polyploids.
