Hydrophobicity assessment of substituted imidazoles: Experimental log P values retrieved by high performance liquid chromatography

• Liquid chromatography quickly measures log k w related with hydrophobicity • Diverse databases report different values of predicted log P of imidazoles • Experimental log k w correlates with log P of imidazoles • Hydrophobicity is related to the molar refractivity Imidazole derivatives are a wide group of organic compounds with applications in chemistry, medicine, biology, and material science. The physicochemical properties of these compounds have been reported in databases and literature; however, data of the important hydrophobicity descriptor log P are limited. The water solubility of imidazoles used as ligands is critical in the design of materials for ambient and electronic applications. In this study, the related descriptor log k w,exper was obtained from reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) for a variety of alkyl and phenyl imidazoles and is supplied with the data article. Comparison with the calculated values of log P pred and log k w,pred from different sources is presented. Experimental values present a good linear relationship with log P pred, and differences between isomers are clear in cases where software yields the same value.