Quantitative structure-retention relationship study of the gas chromatographic retention indices of saturated esters on different stationary phases using novel topological indices

The gas chromatographic retention data of 90 saturated esters obtained isothermally at 150 °C on seven stationary phases (SE-30, OV-7, DC-710, OV-25, XE-60, OV-225 and Silar-5CP) are well-correlated with recently introduced Lu index and novel distance-based atom-type DAI topological indices using multiple linear regression (MLR) method. For the retention indices (RI) based on each stationary phase, the correlation coefficient r of the final models is larger than 0.994, and particularly, the decrease in the standard error is within the range of 53.0–64.8% as compared with the simple linear models with Lu index alone. The results indicate the efficiency of these indices in the structure–retention index correlations of complex compounds. The role of each of the molecular size and individual groups in the molecules is illustrated by analyzing the relative or fraction contributions of individual indices. The results also indicate that the molecular size makes a dominant contribution to retention behaviors, while some atomic type or groups have smaller influence dependent on the polarity of the column. The leave-one-out cross-validation demonstrates the final models to be statistically significant and reliable.