A QSRR study on the relative retention time of halogenated methyl-phenyl ethers

Halogenated methyl-phenyl ethers (anisoles) are ubiquitous organic compounds in the environment. In the present study, geometrical optimization and electrostatic potential calculations have been performed for 42 halogenated anisoles at the HF/6-31G* level. A number of statistically based parameters have been obtained. By multiple regression method, linear relationships between the gas-chromatographic relative retention time (RRT) and structural descriptors have been established for the training set of 32 halogenated anisoles. The result showed that the parameters derived from electrostatic potentials (ESPs) together with the molecular volume (V _mc) could be well used to express the quantitative structure-RRT relationships of halogenated anisoles. The best two-variable regression model gives a correlation coefficient of 0.980 and a standard deviation of 0.07, and the leave-one-out cross-validated correlation coefficient is 0.975. The goodness of the model has been further validated through exploring the predictive power for the testing set of 10 halogenated anisoles.