- Half sphere exposure
Half Sphere Exposure (HSE) is a protein
solvent exposure measure that was first introduced in [Hamelryck T. (2005) An amino acid has two sides: A new 2D measure provides a different view of solvent exposure. Proteins Struct. Func. Bioinf. 59:38-48. ] .Like all solvent exposure measures it measures how buriedamino acid residues are in aprotein . 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 acontact number (CN) sphere in two halves by the plane perpendicular to theCβ-Cα vector. This simple division of the CN sphere results intwo strikingly different measures, HSE-up and HSE-down. HSE-up is defined as the number of Cα atoms in theupper half (containing the pseudo-Cβ atom) and analogously HSE-down is defined as the number of Cα atomsin 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 itscalculation. The position of this pseudo-Cβ atom (pCβ) is derived from the positions of precedingCα-1 and the following Cα+1. The Cα-pCβ vector is calculated by adding theCα-1-Cα0 and Cα+1-Cα0 vectors.
HSE is used in predicting discontinuous B-cell epitopes [PEPITO: Improved discontinuous B-cell epitope prediction using multiple distance thresholds and Half Sphere Exposure.Michael J. Sweredoski and Pierre Baldi, Bioinformatics, 2008] and can be predicted online from sequence [ http://sunflower.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~sjn/hse/help.html (accessed May 13, 2008)] .
References
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