A comparison of calculated and experimental parameters as sources of structural information: the case of lipophilicity-related descriptors.

This review is organized in three parts: firstly there is a general overview of recent developments in lipophilicity written to induce medicinal chemists to question what they want to obtain from this kind of study; secondly, the state-of-the-art of experimental and computational determination of log P is briefly reviewed; finally, some applications are discussed to illustrate how much information can be extracted from lipophilicity, and to highlight the difficulty of obtaining a reliable, general method to work with.