Title:Physicochemical Significance of Topological Indices: Importance in Drug
Discovery Research
Volume: 23
Issue: 29
Author(s): Karanpreet Singh Bhatia, Ankit Kumar Gupta and Anil Kumar Saxena*
Affiliation:
- Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Global Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Kashipur, India
Keywords:
Topological indices, Physicochemical significance, Molar refractivity, QSAR, QSPR, Drug designing.
Abstract:
Background: Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) studies describing
the correlations between biological activity as dependent parameters and physicochemical and
structural descriptors, including topological indices (TIs) as independent parameters, play an important
role in drug discovery research. The emergence of graph theory in exploring the structural
attributes of the chemical space has led to the evolution of various TIs, which have made their way
into drug discovery. The TIs are easy to compute compared to the empirical parameters, but they
lack physiochemical interpretation, which is essential in understanding the mechanism of action.
Objectives: Hence, efforts have been made to review the work on the advances in topological indices,
their physicochemical significance, and their role in developing QSAR models.
Methods: A literature search has been carried out, and the research article providing evidence of the
physicochemical significance of the topological parameters as well as some recent studies utilizing
these parameters in the development of QSAR models, have been evaluated.
Result: In this review, the physicochemical significance of TIs have been described through their
correlations between empirical parameters in terms of explainable physicochemical properties,
along with their application in the development of predictive QSAR models.
Conclusion: Most of these findings suggest a common trend of TIs correlation with MR rather than
logP or other parameters; nevertheless, the developed models may be useful in both drug and vaccine
development.