Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships for the Toxicity to the Tadpole Rana japonica of Selected Phenols

It is infeasible to test the toxicity of every chemical to all species due to the constraints of time and money. Under these circumstances, Quantitative StructureActivity Relationships (QSARs), which can provide a useful tool to predict the hazards of untested chemicals, have proved to be attractive and have been shown to be credible. Toxicants have been divided into many subsets according to their mode of toxic action and separate QSARs were constructed by mechanism-based QSAR methods (Schultz et al 1990a, Cronin and Dearden 1995). Interspecies relationships were also studied to seek the possibility of predicting toxicity to higher organisms following the development of fast, sensitive, easy and low-cost toxicity test systems utilizing microorganisms.