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
3-sphere centered at the origin with radius 1 is called the unit 3-sphere and is usually denoted : It is often convenient to regard as the space with 2 complex dimensions () or the quaternions (). The unit 3-sphere is then given by or This description as the quaternions of norm one identifies the 3-sphere with the versors in the quaternion division ring. Just as the unit circle is important for planar polar coordinates, so the 3-sphere is important in the polar view of 4-space involved in quaternion multiplication. See polar decomposition of a quaternion for details of this development of