Poaceae family.(Avena sativa)
Poaceae family.
Oats are an important crop in the Upper Midwest, Canada, and northern Europe. Oats are well-suited for marginal soils and cool, humid growing conditions. The crop has the second-highest water requirement among the major cereals, after rice. Oats were domesticated sometime during the first millennium B.C. from wild oats which were growing as weeds in fields of emmer and barley in the Near East. Thus, like rye, oat is a secondary crop. Oats became an important human food crop, however, only as they supplanted emmer in the cool climates of northern Europe to which Near Eastern peoples migrated. Still, until recently, the main demand worldwide for oats was as a prime feed for horses. Wild oat species are found throughout the Mediterranean basin and Near East. Oats are a hexaploid (2n=6x=42), like wheat, although they belong to the different tribe AVENAE. Unlike wheat, however, the ancestral species of hexaploid oats have not been clearly identified. Cultivated relatives include A. strigosa, a diploid fodder oat grown primarily in South America, the semi-domesticated Ethiopian A. abyssinica, and the Chinese hulless oat A. sativa nuda. The seven oat races constituting the single, interfertile biological hexaploid oat species include (above, right): 1-sativa; 2-winter sativa; 3-black; 4-byzantina; 5-fatua; 6-sterilis; 7-nuda (hulless). Oat soluble fiber has been shown in replicated research trials to reduce blood serum cholesterol; consequently, demand for oats in the human diet has steadily increased over the past 10 or so years. Oat chromosomal genetics is a major focus of the research in Dr. Jellen's lab.