This month’s innovation series article deals with how to “sense” magnetic fields. Ikeya & Woodward demonstrate that flavin-based autofluorescence in native, untreated HeLa cells is magnetic field sensitive, due to the formation and electron spin–selective recombination of spin-correlated radical pairs. The radical pair mechanism is the favored hypothesis for explaining biological effects of weak magnetic fields, such as animal magnetoreception.
Find the article here https://www.pnas.org/content/118/3/e2018043118
