ES&T Critical Review: Structure-activity relationships. Quantitative techniques for predicting the behavior of chemicals in the ecosystem

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSARs) are used increasingly to screen and predict the toxicity and the fate of chemicals released into the environment. The impetus to use QSAR methods in this area has been the large number of synthetic chemicals introduced into the ecosystem via intensive agriculture and industrialization. Because of the costly and time-consuming nature of environmental fate testing, QSARs have been effectively used to screen large classes of chemical compounds and flag those that appear to warrant more thorough testing.