By Sandi Doughton

Seattle Times science reporter

The philosophy at Daniel Debouck's bank is simple: Savings pay dividends.

His vaults don't hold currency, but more than 66,000 types of seeds and germ plasm representing a big chunk of the world's biological heritage.

When Colombia's cassava crop was on the verge of collapse from whitefly infestations, salvation came in the form of two resistant strains discovered among the nearly 7,000 stored in Debouck's collection at the Centro Internactional de Agricultura Tropical.

A handful of yellow cassava varieties, collected as a curiosity decades ago, proved invaluable when the Gates Foundation and others set out to breed a version high in vitamin A.

"The take-home lesson is: You never know what might happen," said Debouck. A native of Belgium who studied nutrition and plant physiology at Cornell, he has spent the past three decades in a race to save plant species before they disappear from the wild and from farmers' fields across the tropics.

The seed bank holds the world's biggest collections of bean and cassava varieties, as well as grasses and other livestock forage crops. Debouck himself collected more than 3,000 specimens on dozens of expeditions across Latin America.

To maintain the collection, staff grow and multiply crop varieties in a never-ending rotation. Breeders and research labs around the world have "withdrawn" more than half a million batches of seeds or plant starts from the bank, which also makes deposits in the Gates-funded "doomsday seed vault" in Svalbard, Norway.

But despite its value, patching together funds to keep the facility running is a constant struggle, Debouck said.

Fads in breeding come and go, with today's focus on drought-tolerant and high-nutrient crops. But someday farmers may need varieties that tolerate salinity or heat. And the more uniform commercial crops become, the more vulnerable the world's food supply to pests or climatic shifts.

The best hedge is genetic diversity in the bank.

"Our biological heritage is at risk to be lost forever," Debouck said. "And there aren't that many people worrying about it."

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2015848666_seedbank...