Protein Mechanics: From Amino Acid to Swimming Cells

This proceedings paper contains a review of the work presented in the Sectional Lecture in Solids on August 25 at ICTAM 2016. -- Proteins are long polypeptide chains of amino acids and their structure and biological function are directly related to their amino acid sequence. I will discuss three different biological functions that are dominated by protein mechanics, each at their own specific time and length scale. To relate structure to function, multiscale computational models have been developed for (i) cilia and flagella, (ii) actin filament networks and (iii) the nuclear pore complex.