An intuitive approach to measuring protein surface curvature.

A natural way to measure protein surface curvature is to generate the least squares fitted (LSF) sphere to a surface patch and use the radius as the curvature measure. While the concept is simple, the sphere-fitting problem is not trivial and known means of protein surface curvature measurement use alternative schemes that are arguably less straightforward to interpret. We have developed an approach to solve the LSF sphere problem by turning the sphere-fitting problem into a solvable plane-fitting problem using a transformation known as geometric inversion.