Oats rank around sixth in world cereal production statistics, following wheat, maize, rice, barley and sorghum. In many parts of the world, oats are grown for use as grain as well as for forage and fodder, straw for bedding, hay, haylage, silage and chaff. Livestock grain feed is still the primary use of oat crops, accounting for an average of around 74 percent of the world’s total India, breeding of oats begun in nineteen-eighties and is grown as the most important cereal fodder crop in North Western, Central India, extending to the eastern a fodder crop, it has excellent protein quality, fat and mineral content. It is a palatable, succulent and nutritious diseases cause serious direct damage, mainly by reduction of the fodder yield. Among them diseases such as crown rust, stem rusts and leaf blotch. Several resistance genes against the major diseases, . crown rust, stem rust, powdery mildew, BYDY, etc., from oat gene pool have been discoveredin over 31 wild oat species. Several breeding strategies such as marker-assisted selection (MAS), marker-assisted back-crossing (MABC), markerassisted gene pyramiding and marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) are extensively being exploited for incorporating resistance gene introgression into elite cultivars. With the advancement of new sequencing technologies and a rapid development in bioinformatics, complete oat genome sequencing is no longer out of reach. Oat genome sequencing would pave new pathways for breeders to develop a large number of sequence-based markers such as SNPs which will help in identifying the disease resistance genes through exploiting linkage disequilibrium mapping and genomic selection.
