It’s a new bean, old bean!

Congratulations to Daniel Debouck, bean expert and erstwhile manager of the CIAT genebank, for having a new Phaseolus species named after him:

The specific epithet honours Daniel G. Debouck, given his scholarly contributions, and extensive and systematic collections of wild and domesticated Phaseolus throughout the Americas. He was the first to discover this species during a field expedition in Peru (Debouck 1989, 1990). Seeds from one of these collections (G 21245) were sent to UC Davis, where allozyme analyses provided evidence of their uniqueness, not fitting in either the Andean or wild Mesoamerican Phaseolus vulgaris. Based on these results, funding for additional explorations in Ecuador and Colombia, were granted. Further analyses on newly collected materials provided additional evidence from which earlier papers by Debouck et al. (1993) and Kami et al. (1995) evolved.