system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How exactly do measle viruses infect the T-cells?
gpt
Once the measles virus gets onto the mucous membrane, it will infect epithelial cells in the trachea or bronchi. It uses a surface protein named hemagglutinin (H protein), to bind to a target receptor on the host cell, which could be CD150, aka signaling lymphocyte activation molecule or SLAM, which is located on immune cells such as B or T cells. Once it's bound, the fusion/chimeric protein helps the virus fuse with the membrane and eventually get inside the cell. The virus is a single-stranded negative-sense RNA virus which means it first must be transcribed by RNA polymerase into a positive-sense mRNA strand.

Next, it's ready to be translated into viral proteins, wrapped in the cell's lipid envelope, and sent out as a newly constructed virus. In a period of days, the measles virus will spread through the local tissue and will be picked up by dendritic cells and alveolar macrophages, and carried from that local tissue in the lungs to the local lymph nodes. It will then continue to spread, eventually getting into your blood and spreading to even more long tissue, as well as other places such as the intestines or brain.