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Host tropism is the name given a process of tropism that determines which cells can become infected by a given pathogen. Various factors determine the ability of a pathogen to infect a particular cell. Viruses, for example, must bind to specific cell surface receptors to enter a cell. If a cell does not express these receptors then the virus cannot normally infect it.
Viral tropism is determined by a combination of susceptibility and permissiveness: a host cell must be both permissive (allow viral entry) and susceptible (possess the receptor compliment needed for viral entry) for a virus to establish infection.
An example of this is the HIV virus, which exhibits tropism for CD4 related immune cells (eg. T helper cells, macrophages or dendritic cells). These cells express a CD4 receptor, to which the HIV virus can bind, through the gp120 and gp41 proteins on its surface.
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