According to an estimate from the website Share the Luck, there is only one four-leaf clover for every 5,076 three-leaf clovers. So far, we only know that the gene responsible for this rare trait is recessive for the quadruploid plants, and that luck favors warm conditions, approximately two-fold when it comes to growing four leaves.
Vincent Pennetti, who has been fascinated by the iconic plants since he was a teen, recently finished his PhD at the Parrot Lab at the University of Georgia, where they studied the multifoliolate leaves of Trifolium repens (common clovers species).
One of their papers highlights that the Trifolium genus could have originated from multifoliolate ancestors whose leaflet number was reduced during evolutionary time via a dominant locus that inhibits the expression of multifoliolate leaves.
The precise genotype of the iconic four-leaf clovers plants, however, remains a mystery. After all, who wants to invest tax dollars to figure St. Patrick out? This is not a science project. It is an artistic quest on how the cultural meaning of an organism changes as it morphs from a rare gift of nature into an engineered product.
Per his LinkedIn profile, Vincent is still an independent clover breeder. He once sold $300 worth of clovers to a guy who wanted to give them out at a senior living community for St. Patrick’s Day. When it comes to bioengineered clovers though, he thinks that would “ruin the search for everybody else” and prefers not to be the one doing it.
Poets of Living Objects think differently of this issue. A very ambitious project would not only bioengineer Trifolium to have four leaves, but also make its leaves iridescent, bigger, and reactive to touch like Mimosa pudica… as far as I could read, no one has done or tried this yet.
Philosophically speaking, biology has long relied on statistics, a backward-looking lens that reduces reality to frequencies, averages, randomness. Bioengineering, by contrast, could support itself on calculus that captures direction, infinitesimal change, and precise transformation.
The bioengineered four-leaf clover would make a statement: life is no longer a lottery ticket.