2005 Annual Report 4d.Progress report. Progress Report This report serves to document research conducted under a Specific Cooperative agreement between ARS and Alabama A & M.. Additional details of research can be found in the report for the parent CRIS 5366-21000-024-00D Barley and Oat Germplasm Evaluation and Enhancement and progress over the last year. A new faculty member, Ramesh Kantety, hired by the Department of Plant and Soil Science, has been added to the cooperating investigators at AAMU and USDA-ARS, Aberdeen, ID. Ms. Chaitanya Vemulapalli, a Master’s student at AAMU was initiated on the project. Chaitanya’s thesis project is entitled “Assessment of genetic variation in Avena fatua by DNA marker profiling”. The objectives of this study are to assess genetic variation in Avena fatua by PCR-based DNA markers such as, sequence characterized amplified regions (SCARs), simple sequence repeats (SSRs), expressed sequence tag derived simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs), and polymerase chain reaction based restriction fragment length polymorphisms (PCR-RFLPs). Sixty four accessions of A. fatua and four cultivated oat varieties were grown in greenhouse and leaf tissue was collected at 3 weeks old stage for DNA isolation. Leaf tissue samples of 15 cultivated oat genotypes were obtained from Aberdeen. DNA was extracted using the sodium bisulfate DNA extraction procedure used for cereals. DNA quality was estimated by running the DNA samples in 0.8 % Agarose gel @ 40 V for 4 hours and quantified using Fluorometer. A total of 143 primer pairs including 22 RFLP-PCR, 114 SSR, and 7 Intron based primer pairs were identified through literature search. Currently, optimization of PCR conditions for primer pairs is being performed using the cultivated oat genotypes, TAMO-301 and Ogle. Amplified PCR products will be screened for polymorphism using either 4% Metaphor Agarose gels or 6% Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE).