Abstract

Antifungal activity was modeled for a set of 96 heterocyclic ring derivatives (2,5,6-trisubstituted benzoxazoles, 2,5-disubstituted benzimidazoles, 2-substituted benzothiazoles and 2-substituted oxazolo(4,5-b)pyridines) using multiple linear regression (MLR) and Bayesian-regularized artificial neural network (BRANN) techniques. Inhibitory activity against Candida albicans (log(1/C)) was correlated with 3D descriptors encoding the chemical structures of the heterocyclic compounds. Training and test sets were chosen by means of k-Means Clustering. The most appropriate variables for linear and nonlinear modeling were selected using a genetic algorithm (GA) approach. In addition to the MLR equation (MLR-GA), two nonlinear models were built, model BRANN employing the linear variable subset and an optimum model BRANN-GA obtained by a hybrid method that combined BRANN and GA approaches (BRANN-GA). The linear model fit the training set (n=80) with r(2)=0.746, while BRANN and BRANN-GA gave higher values of r(2)=0.889 and r(2)=0.937, respectively. Beyond the improvement of training set fitting, the BRANN-GA model was superior to the others by being able to describe 87% of test set (n=16) variance in comparison with 78 and 81% the MLR-GA and BRANN models, respectively. Our quantitative structure-activity relationship study suggests that the distributions of atomic mass, volume and polarizability have relevant relationships with the antifungal potency of the compounds studied. Furthermore, the ability of the six variables selected nonlinearly to differentiate the data was demonstrated when the total data set was well distributed in a Kohonen self-organizing neural network (KNN).