Series

The experts" judgement data on microbial degradation were used to develop the first general QSAR biodegradability model (Boethling and Sabljic, 1989) which is composed of a set of structural descriptors and a set of quantitative rules. Its evaluation and validation with experimental biodegradation data clearly show that the developed model gives a realistic and reliable account of structure-biodegradability relationship for organic chemicals. The same set of experts judgement data was used to develop structure-biodegradation rules by the application of an inductive machine learning method. An improved structure-biodegradation rule was derived from a larger training set of 160 chemicals, i.e. the combined experts" judgement and evaluated experimental biodegradation data. This rule has good predictive ability and discloses logical dependencies of organic chemicals. Thus, the understanding of biodegradation processes will benefit from the developed rule.