Structure-activity relationships for biodegradation: A critical review

Abstract

Given the general lack of experimental data, at the moment an increasing number of models are being developed that may be used to predict the environmental fate of organic chemicals, based solely on their chemical structure or physico-chemical properties. For most organic chemicals, biodegradation is the dominant environmental removal process. With the aim of assessing the limitations of Quantitative Structure Biodegradation Relationships (QSBRs) presently available, this contribution reviews the approaches used to derive QSBRs and on the results obtained. First an introduction is given on the general principles that form the fundamentals of most QSBRs developed so far, including a summary of the methods and the descriptors most commonly used. Subsequently a number of QSBRs reported in literature and their limitations are discussed. Finally, some aspects of the integrated approach that needs to be followed in order to be able to comfortably predict "real world" biodegradation rates in soil and water, is presented.