Half sphere exposure Half sphere exposure Half Sphere Exposure (HSE) is a protein solvent exposure measure that was first introduced by . Like all solvent exposure measures it measures how buried amino acid residues are in a protein. It is found by counting the number of amino acid neighbors within two half spheres of chosen radius around the amino acid. The calculation of HSE is found by dividing a contact number (CN) sphere in two halves by the plane perpendicular to the Cβ-Cα vector. This simple division of the CN sphere results in two strikingly different measures, HSE-up and HSE-down. HSE-up is defined
Sphere which is the center of the mathematical ball. These are also referred to as the radius and center of the sphere, respectively. The longest straight line through the ball, connecting two points of the sphere, passes through the center and its length is thus twice the radius; it is a diameter of both the sphere and its ball. While outside mathematics the terms "sphere" and "ball" are sometimes used interchangeably, in mathematics the above distinction is made between a "sphere", which is a two-dimensional closed surface, embedded in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, and a "ball", which is a three-dimensional shape