Half sphere exposure used in predicting discontinuous B-cell epitopes. Song et al. have developed an online webserver termed HSEpred to predict half-sphere exposure from protein primary sequences. HSEpred server can achieve the correlation coefficients of 0.72 and 0.68 between the predicted and observed HSE-up and HSE-down measures, respectively, when evaluated on a well-prepared non-homologous protein structure dataset. Moreover, residue contact number (CN) can also be accurately predicted by HSEpred webserver using the summation of the predicted HSE-up and HSE-down values, which has further enlarged the application of this new solvent exposure measure. Recently, Heffernan et al. has developed the most accurate predictor for
Half sphere exposure as the number of Cα atoms in the upper half (containing the pseudo-Cβ atom) and analogously HSE-down is defined as the number of Cα atoms in the opposite sphere. If only Cα atoms are available (as is the case for many simplified representations of protein structure), a related measure, called HSEα, can be used. HSEα uses a pseudo-Cβ instead of the real Cβ atom for its calculation. The position of this pseudo-Cβ atom (pCβ) is derived from the positions of preceding Cα and the following Cα. The Cα-pCβ vector is calculated by adding the Cα-Cα and Cα-Cα vectors. HSE is