A general QSAR model for predicting the acute toxicity of pesticides to Lepomis macrochirus

A Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) model was derived for estimating the acute toxicity of pesticides against Lepomis macrochirus un der varying experimental conditions. Chemicals were described by means of a utocorrelation descriptors encoding lipophilicity (H-0 to H-5) and the H-bo nding acceptor ability (HBA(0)) and H-bonding donor ability (HBD0) of the p esticides. A three-layer feedforward neural network trained by the back-pro pagation algorithm was used as statistical engine for deriving a powerful O SAR model accounting for the weight of the fish, time of exposure, temperat ure, pH, and water hardness.