In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body)
immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations.
This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots for
which the inertia effects can be neglected. Our first main contribution is to prove that
any such microswimmer has the ability to track, by performing a sequence of shape changes,
any given trajectory in the fluid. We show that, in addition, this can be done by means of
arbitrarily small body deformations that can be superimposed to any preassigned sequence
of macro shape changes. Our second contribution is to prove that, when no macro
deformations are prescribed, tracking is generically possible by means of shape changes
obtained as a suitable combination of only four elementary deformations. Eventually, still
considering finite dimensional deformations, we state results about the existence of
optimal swimming strategies on short time intervals, for a wide class of cost
functionals.