E-state modeling of fish toxicity independent of 3D structure information

Topological structure methods are used to model fish toxicity against three classes of organic chemicals. The models were obtained independent of 3D structure information. Further, no mechanism of partitioning was assumed, thus avoiding the problems associated with selection of partitioning system for computation of log P. QSAR models were developed for a set of 92 compounds, including phenols, anilines and substituted aromatic hydrocarbons, yielding excellent statistics: r2 = 0.87, s = 0.25 and q2 = 0.85 leave-one-out (LOO), that are better than those reported in the literature. The model is based on molecular connectivity valence chi-1 index [1chiv], the atom type E-State indices for chlorine [ST(-Cl)] and for ether oxygen [ST(-O-)], and the maximum hydrogen E-State atom value in a molecule [Hmax]. Each of the subgroups was also separately well modeled. The model for the full set is validated through use of external validation test sets and ten-fold cross-validation (repeated three times). The quality of the validation statistics supports the claim that the model may be used for estimation of pLC50 values for similar molecules. Detailed structure interpretation is given for the descriptors in the model. These four structure descriptors encode influence of molecular context of groups as well as counts of those groups, in addition to molecular skeletal structure.