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Francesco Lenci: a unique combination of top achievements in research, education and promotion in the field of photobiology.

This editorial is dedicated to Francesco Lenci on the occasion of his 67th birthday. It is certainly a great honour and a deep pleasure for me to outline Francesco’s activities, as well as to comment on his achievements in the field of photobiology. Actually, for some time, I have been hesitant to accept this task owing to our warm friendship, which has now lasted for more than forty years and has steadily grown in its scientific and human aspects as a consequence of the almost spontaneous harmony of our ideas and our intensive side-by-side work to address important and challenging questions concerning the advancement of photobiology. However, an attentive reading of Francesco’s CV and the unanimous statements which I collected from a number of colleagues unequivocally convinced me that the quality and far-reaching consequences of Francesco’s accomplishments are above any possibility of misinterpretation or even unintentionally overstated assessments. Graduated in physics at the University of Pisa in 1968, Francesco immediately took up his scientific career at the National Research Council (CNR) Institute of Biophysics in Pisa, where he had the opportunity to cultivate what represented for him a particularly attractive topic, namely the effects of UV and visible light on biological systems. His dedication to this subject is witnessed by his first paper published in an international journal (Studia Biophysica) which appeared already in 1969. The early seventies of the previous century can be considered as a particularly fruitful era in many biological fields, including photobiology, since it marked the extensive utilization of molecular-based techniques for the interpretation of processes occurring at a cellular or subcellular level. Francesco’s investigations were fully in line with this trend, as he gave significant contributions to the elucidation of energy transfer processes and photosensitized reactions involving a variety of biomolecules. This segment of Francesco’s investigations is a clear demonstration of his typically interdisciplinary and experimentally accurate approach in the planning and implementation of research programmes: in many cases, his findings were reached through the concerted utilization of microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, often involving instrumentation designed or refined in-house with properties and performance tailored to the specific system under investigation. These characteristics of Francesco’s scientific mentality became even more apparent when his interests focused on an especially fascinating subject, such as the role of light as an information carrier to living organisms. Toward this end, starting from 1975 till now, Francesco’s activities were predominantly devoted to the study of photomotile responses in flagellated unicellular photosynthetic algae and ciliated protozoa. Such studies ranged from the primary photophysical and photochemical events taking place in the photoreceptor pigments, as well as in their complexes with the associated proteins, to the metabolic and physiological strategies adopted by microorganisms in order to optimize their interaction with light or protect themselves against potentially damaging consequences. There are very few examples of complex biological systems which have been studied to such a complete and systematic extent by one laboratory, each step in the overall work design being at the same time innovative and suggestive of additional progress. Looking back through the decades, one can safely state that Francesco was a pioneer in the development of supramolecular photobiology, applying its concepts to both artificial models and natural targets including functionally active cells. As a result, the research unit, which he gradually organized by selecting highly motivated investigators when he was appointed as the director of the CNR Institute of Biophysics, came to play a front-running role and to represent a reference point for all those who are interested in photosensory biology, as shown by the numerous reviews and invited lectures at international congresses that Francesco and his coworkers were asked to prepare. Highlights of Francesco’s scientific production in regard to this research line are represented by the paper published in Acc. Chem. Res., 2001, 34, 9, which provides an exhaustive and