Prediction of the half-lives of polychlorinated biphenyls based on the IEF-PCM calculations

Abstract

Three-dimensional structures of 62 polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) congeners were optimized with the integral equation formalism polarizable continuum model (IEF-PCM) in combination with the density functional theory (DFT) method at 6-31G(d) level. By applying support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, a nonlinear quantitative structure–property relationship (QSPR) model was built to predict half-lives (log [Formula: see text]) of 62 PCBs in juvenile rainbow trout. The optimal SVM model based on the parameters [Formula: see text] of 854.721 and [Formula: see text] of 0.0565 produces the root-mean-square (rms) errors of 0.0352 for the training set and 0.0446 for the test set, which are less than that of the previous models reported. The results suggest that it is feasible to build SVM models for the half-lives of PCBs with IEF-PCM and B3LYP/6-31G(d) for deriving structural descriptors.