HFSP Long-Term Fellowships (LTF) are for applicants with a Ph.D. in a biological discipline, who will broaden their expertise by proposing a project in the life sciences which is significantly different from their previous Ph.D. or postdoctoral work.

Benjamin Schwessinger received a LTF for 2012-2015 for the following study:

The first line of plant and mammalian innate immunity is constituted by pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) recognizing conserved microbial signatures. After ligand perception PRRs employ non-RD kinases to initiate intracellular signaling cascades. Non-RD kinases lack the highly conserved arginine (R) that precedes the catalytic aspartate (D) typical of most kinases. Despite their fundamental role in innate immune signaling the regulatory mechanisms governing non-RD kinases are still poorly understood. The proposed studies will address an important question: How is the structure of non-RD kinases advantageous for their biological function? A case study of the rice immune receptor kinase XA21.