Quantitative structure-activity relationship vapor pressure

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). 

Basak, S. C., Mills, D. Development of quantitative structure-activity relationship models for vapor pressure estimation using computed molecular descriptors. ARKIVOC 2005, 2005(x), 308-320. 

In keeping with this method, several approaches have been developed to document methods and dose-response relationships for irritation in humans. This work suggests that, at least for nonreactive compounds such esters, aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, carboxylic acids, aromatic hydrocarbons, and pyridine, the percentage of vapor pressure saturation of a compound is a reasonable predictor of its irritant potency. Specific physical properties of molecules predict overall irritation potential. This work is based on the identification of irritant thresholds for homologous series of specific agents. Quantitative structure-activity relationships derived from such work suggests a reasonable model to explain mucosal irritation. 

Quantitative structure-activity relationships have been developed for a series of 10 sesquiter-penoids with close structural similarity. Physicochemical parameters were evaluated for their contribution to mosquito-repelling activity. The optimal model that was developed included several electronic properties and vapor pressure as the most important factors in causing repellency, and the most relevant electronic descriptors were polarizability, electrotopological state, and Mulliken populations (of electrons) and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital. - ... 

Therefore, similar to the attempts made to estimate vapor pressure (Section 4.4) there have been a series of quite promising approaches to derive topological, geometric, and electronic molecular descriptors for prediction of aqueous activity coefficients from chemical structure (e.g., Mitchell and Jurs, 1998 Huibers and Katritzky, 1998). The advantage of such quantitative structure property relationships (QSPRs) is, of course, that they can be applied to any compound for which the structure is known. The disadvantages are that these methods require sophisticated computer software, and that they are not very transparent for the user. Furthermore, at the present stage, it remains to be seen how good the actual predictive capabilities of these QSPRs are. 

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