Modified connectivity indices and their application to QSPR study

A modified adjacency matrix was developed to delineate the chemical graph of a compound, in which the element a(ii) along the diagonal of the matrix reflects the numbers of the lone-pair electrons and pi bonds of the ith atom, and the off-diagonal element a(ij) of the matrix characterizes whether the jth non-hydrogen atom is bonded to the ith non-hydrogen atom as well as the number of hydrogen atoms bonded to the jth non-hydrogen atom. The corresponding vertex-degree matrix can distinguish the non-hydrogen atoms in the compound better than that from the original adjacency matrix. Based on the newly proposed adjacency matrix, modified molecular connectivity indices (mMCIs) were proposed as structural descriptors for organic compounds, which were applied to the QSPR studies on the boiling point temperature, molar volume and molar refraction of alkanes, alkenes and alcohols. The results show that, in most cases, the mMCIs give improved correlations than the original molecular connectivity indices (MCIs), which are particularly suitable to distinguish isomers.