Polymer Coating Materials and Their Fouling Release Activity: A Cheminformatics Approach to Predict Properties

A novel cheminformatics-based approach has been employed to investigate a set of polymer coating materials designed to mitigate the accumulation of marine biofouling on surfaces immersed in the sea. Specifically, a set of 27 nontoxic, amphiphilic polysiloxane-based polymer coatings was synthesized using a combinatorial, high-throughput approach and characterized for fouling-release (FR) activity toward a number of relevant marine fouling organisms, including bacteria, microalgae, and adult barnacles. In order to model these complex systems adequately, a new computational technique was used in which all investigated polymer-based coating materials were considered as mixture systems comprising several compositional variables at a range of concentrations. By applying a combination of methodologies for mixture systems and a quantitative structure-activity relationship approach (QSAR), seven unique QSAR models were developed that were able to successfully predict the desired FR properties. Furthermore, the developed models identified several significant descriptors responsible for FR activity of investigated polymer-based coating materials, with correlation coefficients ranging from r_test² = 0.63 to 0.94. The computational models derived from this study may serve as a powerful set of tools to predict optimal combinations of source components to produce amphiphilic polysiloxane-based coating systems with effective, broad-spectrum FR properties.