Significant progress has been made over the past couple of decades concerning our understanding of the abiotic transformation pathways of organic chemicals in aquatic ecosystems. Much of this process science, however, has not been made readily available to the decision makers in regulatory agencies who are responsible for the registration of new and existing chemicals. To address this problem, we are developing a Reaction Pathway Simulator (RPS), which is one of the major components of Environmental Fate Simulator (EFS). The EFS is being developed to provide necessary physicochemical data for both the parent chemical and predicted transformation products required for estimating environmental concentrations through the seamless parameterization of environmental fate and transport models. The encoding of the process science begins with the identification of functional groups that are susceptible to abiotic transformation (initially focused on reduction, hydrolysis and chemical sorption) based on the peer-reviewed literature and on-going in-house research. Reaction libraries are then generated for these reactive functional groups (e.g., ArNO2 ? ArNH2 and RCO2R' ? RCO2H + HOR') based on the generation of Smart Reaction Strings (SMILES string notation for representing single-step transformations). The single-step transformations can be further enhanced through the integration of Chemical Terms Language with physicochemical properties and structural indices generated by plug-in calculators to develop reaction rules governing selectivity and reactivity. Examples including the regioselective reduction of nitroaromatic compounds containing multiple nitro groups and the reactivity of the resulting aromatic amines towards chemical sorption through nucleophilic addition will be presented.

Application of cheminformatics tools for encoding the process science necessary for prediction of abiotic transformation pathways for organic chemicals in aquatic ecosystems

246th National Meeting (2013)

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