Physical-chemical properties

The octanol-to-air partition ratio (KOA) is a physical property of chemicals that describes the tendency for chemicals to persist in the environment, bioaccumulate and cause toxicity to organisms. There are directly measured KOA values for less than one thousand chemicals because of limitations in traditional measurement techniques. We aim to develop a direct gas chromatography retention time (GC-RT) method for large-scale measurement KOA values for chemicals of concern. Gas chromatography is a separation technique in which a gaseous mobile phase containing analytes pass through a stationary phase. The stationary phase in this case is an octanol column and the time it takes for analytes to exit the column depends on their affinity for the octanol. Future work will involve further method optimization and establishing a database of KOA values measured using direct GC-RT.