QSTR modeling for qualitative and quantitative toxicity predictions of diverse chemical pesticides in honey bee for regulatory purposes.

Pesticides are designed toxic chemicals for specific purposes and can harm nontarget species as well. The honey bee is considered a nontarget test species for toxicity evaluation of chemicals. Global QSTR (quantitative structure-toxicity relationship) models were established for qualitative and quantitative toxicity prediction of pesticides in honey bee (Apis mellifera) based on the experimental toxicity data of 237 structurally diverse pesticides. Structural diversity of the chemical pesticides and nonlinear dependence in the toxicity data were evaluated using the Tanimoto similarity index and Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman statistics. Probabilistic neural network (PNN) and generalized regression neural network (GRNN) QSTR models were constructed for classification (two and four categories) and function optimization problems using the toxicity end point in honey bees. The predictive power of the QSTR models was tested through rigorous validation performed using the internal and external procedures employing a wide series of statistical checks. In complete data, the PNN-QSTR model rendered a classification accuracy of 96.62% (two-category) and 95.57% (four-category), while the GRNN-QSTR model yielded a correlation (R(2)) of 0.841 between the measured and predicted toxicity values with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.22. The results suggest the appropriateness of the developed QSTR models for reliably predicting qualitative and quantitative toxicities of pesticides in honey bee. Both the PNN and GRNN based QSTR models constructed here can be useful tools in predicting the qualitative and quantitative toxicities of the new chemical pesticides for regulatory purposes.