Exploring structural requirements of simple benzene derivatives for adsorption on carbon nanotubes: CoMFA, GRIND, and HQSAR

In this work, three quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) methods involving comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA) and GRid-INdependent Descriptors (GRIND) based 3D-QSAR and hologram QSAR (HQSAR) were evaluated for predicting adsorption coefficients of the simple benzene derivatives on mutiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). The contour maps of CoMFA suggested that the steric hindrance had a significant impact on the adsorption process of substituted benzenes. GRIND studies investigate the important mutual distances between molecular features, which confirmed the role of hydrophobic groups as well as their distances from different steric hot spots in the benzene ring of the molecules. According to HQSAR model and its fragment contribution map, the hydrogen bond donor and acceptor were also found to play an important role in governing adsorption of substituted benzenes on CNTs. The CoMFA, GRIND, and HQSAR methods employed to build predictive 2D- and 3D-QSAR models for adsorption of simple benzene derivatives on CNTs in aqueous media successfully.