Structure-activity relationships in nitro-aromatic compounds

Abstract

Many nitro-aromatic compounds show mutagenic and carcinogenic properties, posing a potential human health risk. Despite this potential health hazard, nitro-aromatic compounds continue to be emitted into ambient air from municipal incinerators, motor vehicles, and industrial power plants. As a result, understanding the structural and electronic factors that influence mutagenicity in nitro-aromatic compounds has been a long standing objective. Progress toward this goal has accelerated over the years, in large part due to the synergistic efforts among toxicology, computational chemistry, and statistical modeling of toxicological data. The concerted influence of several structural and electronic factors in nitro-aromatic compounds makes the development of structure-activity relationships (SARs) a paramount challenge. Mathematical models that include a regression analysis show promise in predicting the mutagenic activity of nitro-aromatic compounds as well as in prioritizing compounds for which experimental data should be pursued. A major challenge of the structure-activity models developed thus far is their failure to apply beyond a subset of nitro-aromatic compounds. Most quantitative structure-activity relationship papers point to statistics as the most important confirmation of the validity of a model. However, the experimental evidence shows the importance of the chemical knowledge in the process of generating models with reasonable applicability. This chapter will concisely summarize the structural and electronic factors that influence the mutagenicity in nitro-aromatic compounds and the recent efforts to use quantitative structure-activity relationships to predict those physicochemical properties. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.