The impact of lipophilicity on environmental processes, drug delivery and bioavailability of food components

Abstract Lipophilic properties of the compound allow to predict its fate in living organisms and to propose the models of chemicals transport and accumulation in the ecosystem. Lipophilicity is also useful as the characteristic of chemicals in respect to their optimal attributes for specific biological and non-biological tasks. The lipophilicity descriptors define the potency of endo - and xenobiotics to metabolic transformations and their affinity to target proteins. Therefore, the lipophilicity optimization allows to find the optimal structure of drugs in quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies. Additionally, lipophilicity governs the transport of chemicals in the environment and the food delivery systems of bioactive compounds. This review focuses mainly on the lipophilicity importance in the environmental and human life sciences, its multidisciplinary character and applications, availability of reliable partition/distribution coefficients and methods of their assessment.