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A team of UK scientists is exploring gene-editing technology as a potential solution to an unstoppable fungal disease decimating the world’s banana plantations. A fungal disease called

“fusarium wilt”, or Panama disease, “has been attacking plantations in Australia, south-east Asia and parts of Africa and the Middle East”, The Guardian reports - and there are fears it

could spread to the banana-growing heartlands of Latin America. Traditional fungicides are unable to prevent the spread of the virulent strain, and breeding a new variety of the fruit is not

an option because banana crops are cloned rather than bred. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

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From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Start-up Tropic Biosciences, based in Norwich, has used

cutting-edge gene editing techniques to develop a banana cell which it believes would be resilient to Panama disease. “Gene editing makes a lot of sense, because the only way you can change

the banana now is through genetics,” CEO Gilad Gershon told Fast Company. “If we don’t [take] this type of role and save the banana, I’m not sure there’s any other way to do it.” Field

trials of the genetically engineered species are to begin this year in central America, the Philippines and Turkey. When Panama disease last struck on this scale, in the 1950s, it wiped out

the world’s dominant banana species, the Gros Michel - generally regarded as more flavourful than the Cavendish bananas we eat today. The 1923 vaudeville novelty song _Yes! We Have No

Bananas_ is thought to have been inspired by the shortages caused by early outbreaks. The disease spread beyond Panama, and by the 1950s, Gros Michel plantations had been decimated beyond

redemption. A more resistant strain of banana, the Cavendish, quickly took over as the pre-eminent species. Cavendish bananas now account for 99.9% of all bananas exported around the world.

But monoculture - the cultivation of one variety of crop to the exclusion of all others - is a ticking time bomb, environmental scientist Jackie Turner warned earlier this month in digital

magazine Aeon. “When a population lacks genetic diversity, its members have a heightened risk of succumbing to disease,” she wrote. “Staking the fate of a fruit on monoculture is dangerous

in the extreme.”