Examples of QSARs and QSPRs

There is a continuing effort to extend the long-established concept of quantitative-structure-activity-relationships (QSARs) to quantitative-structure-property relationships (QSPRs) to compute all relevant environmental physical-chemical properties (such as aqueous solubility, vapor pressure, octanol-water partition coefficient, Henry s law constant, bioconcentration factor (BCF), sorption coefficient and environmental reaction rate constants from molecular structure). 

Handbook of Physical-Chemical Properties and Environmental Fate for Organic Chemicals 

A fundamental problem encountered in these correlations is the mismatch between the accuracy of experimental data and the molecular descriptors which can be calculated with relatively high precision, usually within a few percent. The accuracy may not always be high, but for correlation purposes precision is more important than accuracy. The precision and accuracy of the experimental data are often poor, frequently ranging over a factor of two or more. Certain isomers may yield identical descriptors, but have different properties. There is thus an inherent limit to the applicability of QSPRs imposed by the quality of the experimental data, and further efforts to improve descriptors, while interesting and potentially useful, may be unlikely to yield demonstrably improved QSPRs. 

One of the most useful and accessible set of QSARs is that developed primarily by Howard and Meylan at the Syracuse Research Corporation, NY. These estimation methods are available as the EPISuite set from their website at www.syrres.com. 

For correlation of solubility, the correct thermodynamic quantities for correlation are the activity coefficient y, or the excess Gibbs free energy AG, as discussed by Pierotti et al. (1959) and Tsonopoulos and Prausnitz (1971). Examples of such correlations are given below. 

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