State of the art and prospects of methods for determination of lipophilicity of chemical compounds

Abstract Lipophilicity of the compounds is useful to (i) explain their distribution in biological systems, which is different in plant and in animal organisms, (ii) predict the possible pathways of pollutant transport in the environment, and (iii) support drug discovery process and select optimal composition in terms of bioactivity and bioavailability. The lipophilic properties can be determined by two main approaches, experimental, which apply instrumental techniques or computational, which is based on the complex algorithms. This review focuses primarily on various analytical methods that are used in the lipophilicity measurements. The classical methods and others based on chromatographic, electroanalytical and electroseparation approaches are compared and described in details. Modern solutions with chromatographic systems and their practical applications in the measurements of lipophilic and biomimetic properties of compounds have been included. However, there is an urgent need to standardize the high-throughput and reliable analytical procedure of the evaluation of lipophilic properties.