Vincenzo Pavone: Friend, mentor and inspiring scientist (2018)

Welcome to this special issue of Biopolymers dedicated to Prof. Vincenzo Pavone, in celebration of his 65th birthday. The reviews and original articles included in this issue are contributed by friends, collaborators and former students of Vincenzo. They pay tribute to his outstanding career, research accomplishments, and valuable role as mentor and inspiring scientist. Born in Naples in 1952, he graduated in chemistry in 1976 from the University of Naples Federico II (Italy), and since 1994 he has been full professor of general and inorganic chemistry there. He began his career in the late 1970s at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, U.S.A.), where he undertook studies on proteins and peptides using molecular graphics techniques that at the time were at the forefront of study on the structure and dynamics of such complex molecules. Upon his return to Naples, he dedicated his research activity to structural analysis by X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. At the end of the 1980s, he spent a sabbatical at the Mitsubishi Kasei Institute of Life Science (Tokyo, Japan), where he began working on the design of new molecules with predetermined structure and properties. These formative years, and the numerous collaborations he has subsequently had during his career, allowed Vincenzo to acquire an interdisciplinary vision of science, and to generate new and exciting research topics beyond the state-of-the-art. Indeed, Vincenzo's distinguished research accomplishments include both the fundamental advancement of knowledge, and translation of this knowledge into products that may find practical applications in various fields, such as medicine, sensors and diagnostics. His work has made significant and lasting additions to the areas of bioinorganic chemistry, and peptide and protein design. For example, his pioneering studies of non-coded amino acids (including α,α-disubstituted glycines and β-substituted amino acids) represent early contributions to foldamer design. He developed a wide range of bioactive peptides, and greatly advanced the field of metalloprotein design through the development of peptide-based hemeprotein models. As important as his devotion to research is Vincenzo's enthusiasm for teaching at all levels. He has taught general and inorganic chemistry to thousands of students. He has also been a great advisor and a source of inspiration to the hundreds of masters and Ph.D. students, and postdoctoral associates that have worked in his laboratory. We have all had the privilege of working with Vincenzo since the early stage of our careers, and his conduct instilled in us that thoroughness, curiosity and enthusiasm are essential qualities of a scientist. Vincenzo circa 2010 in his office, at the Department of Chemical Sciences, University of Naples Federico II (left). Vincenzo constructing a peptide molecular model in the early 1980s (right) We remember the long time we spent in the early 1990s on building a ball and stick model of the hirudin structure when interacting with thrombin. The structure of the thrombin–hirudin complex was solved by the Tulinsky and Huber groups, and published in Science in 1990, and in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1991.1, 2 At that time, the atomic coordinates were not available in the protein data bank (PDB), and the first structure was released in 1994 (PDB ID 4HTC). Using a stereoview image taken from the paper, and a stereo viewer, we young fellows helped him in taking the two-dimensional (2D) atomic coordinates from both the left and right panel of the image. He developed a program for generating 3D coordinates from the 2D coordinates and finally constructed the model. All these curious activities allowed him to manually design, as can be seen in the photograph, the hirunorm class of multi-site thrombin inhibitors that we published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and in Protein Science.3-5 As Guest Editors, we would like to thank all of the contributors for joining us in celebrating Vincenzo's birthday, as well as all Vincenzo's students and coworkers who shared research projects and enjoyable times with him over the years. We would also like to extend our thanks to the Biopolymers Editor-in-Chief, Hilary Crichton, and the rest of the editorial team for their efforts in making this special issue possible. Lastly, we would like to thank the readers, hoping that they will enjoy this special issue! Page from Vincenzo's notebook illustrating part of the hirudin sequence and the possible substitutions that were used for developing the hirunorm class of thrombin inhibitors We thank you Vincenzo; we are deeply indebted to you for your pioneering vision in science!