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 Two spheres intersect at the same angle at all points of their circle of intersection. They intersect at right angles (are orthogonal) if and only if the squares of the distance between their centers is equal to the sum of the squares of their radii. If and are the equations of two distinct spheres then is also the equation of a sphere for arbitrary values of the parameters and . The set of all spheres satisfying this equation is called a pencil of spheres determined by the original two spheres. In this definition a sphere is allowed to be a