Prediction of Partition Coefficients of Environmental Toxins Using Computational Chemistry Methods

The partitioning of compounds between aqueous and other phases is important for predicting toxicity. Although thousands of octanol–water partition coefficients have been measured, these represent only a small fraction of the anthropogenic compounds present in the environment. The octanol phase is often taken to be a mimic of the inner parts of phospholipid membranes. However, the core of such membranes is typically more hydrophobic than octanol, and other partition coefficients with other compounds may give complementary information. Although a number of (cheap) empirical methods exist to compute octanol–water (log kOW) and hexadecane–water (log kHW) partition coefficients, it would be interesting to know whether physics-based models can predict these crucial values more accurately. Here, we have computed log kOW and log kHW for 133 compounds from seven different pollutant categories as well as a control group using the solvation model based on electronic density (SMD) protocol based on Hartree–Fock (HF) ...