ReviewNature reviews. Chemistry2021
Chemically-powered swimming and diffusion in the microscopic world.
Review in Nature reviews. Chemistry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 120 citations in OpenAlex.
- Synergistic magneto-enzymatic propulsion enables multimodal nanomotor swarms.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Gradient-Field-Based Force-Driven Control of a Mudskipper-Inspired Magnetic Microrobot for Intestinal Applications.Micromachines · 2026Article
- Self-propelled platinum based magnetite Janus nanomotors prepared from PCL and PHEMA graft copolymer with physicochemical properties motility and peroxidase-like activity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Programming DNA machines to move.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2026Review
- Autonomous Microrobots for Spatiotemporally Active Therapeutic Delivery and Controlled Release.Cyborg and bionic systems (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Review
- A roadmap for next-generation nanomotors.Nature nanotechnology · 2025Review
- Bioengineering Outer-Membrane Vesicles for Vaccine Development: Strategies, Advances, and Perspectives.Vaccines · 2025Review
- Micro- and Nano-Bots for Infection Control.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Review
- Single-Atom Colloidal Nanorobotics Enhanced Stem Cell Therapy for Corneal Injury Repair.ACS nano · 2025Article
- Super-Resolution Mapping and Quantification of Molecular Diffusion via Single-Molecule Displacement/Diffusivity Mapping (SMAccounts of chemical research · 2025Article
- Frozen by Heating: Temperature Controlled Dynamic States in Droplet Microswimmers.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Article
- Metareview: a survey of active matter reviews.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2025Review
- Single molecule-driven nanomotors reveal the dynamic-disordered chemomechanical transduction of active enzymes.Science advances · 2025Article
- Light-dependent switching between two flagellar beating states selects versatile phototaxis strategies in microswimmers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Exploring Emergent Properties in Enzymatic Reaction Networks: Design and Control of Dynamic Functional Systems.Chemical reviews · 2024Review
- Positive Chemotactic Flasklike Colloidal Motors Propelled by Rotary FResearch (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Automated control of catalytic Janus micromotors.MRS advances · 2023Article
- Catalytically Propelled Micro- and Nanoswimmers.Small science · 2023Article
- Dual enzyme-powered chemotactic cross β amyloid based functional nanomotors.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Autonomous metal-organic framework nanorobots for active mitochondria-targeted cancer therapy.Science advances · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The past decade has seen intriguing reports and heated debates concerning the chemically-driven enhanced motion of objects ranging from small molecules to millimetre-size synthetic robots. These objects, in solutions in which chemical reactions were occurring, were observed to diffuse (spread non-directionally) or swim (move directionally) at rates exceeding those expected from Brownian motion alone. The debates have focused on whether observed enhancement is an experimental artefact or a real phenomenon. If the latter were true, then we would also need to explain how the chemical energy is converted into mechanical work. In this Perspective, we summarize and discuss recent observations and theories of active diffusion and swimming. Notably, the chemomechanical coupling and magnitude of diffusion enhancement are strongly size-dependent and should vanish as the size of the swimmers approaches the molecular scale. We evaluate the reliability of common techniques to measure diffusion coefficients and finish by considering the potential applications and chemical to mechanical energy conversion efficiencies of typical nanoswimmers and microswimmers.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.