ArticlePhysical review letters2026
Light-Dependent Switching of Circling Handedness in Microswimmer Navigation.
Article in Physical review letters, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Theory of cell body lensing and phototaxis sign reversal in "eyeless" mutants of Chlamydomonas.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Controlling the Collective Transport of Large Passive Particles With Suspensions of Microorganisms.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many swimming microorganisms navigate their environment by modulating the curvature of their swimming trajectories in response to external cues. Here, we show that the biflagellate alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii swims in circles and actively switches its trajectory handedness in response to orthogonal illumination: the cell swims counterclockwise at low light intensities yet clockwise at high light intensities. This handedness switching arises from light-dependent modulation of flagellar beating, including rapid and reversible changes in beat extension, phase, and-crucially-beat plane orientation. Using high-speed imaging and hydrodynamic modeling, we reveal that this beat plane reorientation is critical for Chlamydomonas to swim orthogonally to light as well as to dynamically modulate its trajectory curvature, enabling transitions between global exploration and localized searching in spatially structured light fields. Our results establish beat plane reorientation as a novel mechanism for curvature control in microswimmer navigation.
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Registered trials
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