Abstract
Herein, I will review our efforts to develop a comprehensive and robust model for the estimation of the first oxidation potential, E(p1), and antioxidant activity, AA, of flavonoids that would, besides enabling fast and cheap prediction of E(p1) and AA for a flavonoid of interest, help us explain the relationship between E(p1), AA and electronic structure. The model development went forward with enlarging the set of flavonoids and, that way, we had to learn how to deal with the structural peculiarities of some of the 35 flavonoids from the final calibration set, for which the E(p1) measurements were all made in our laboratory. The developed models were simple quadratic models based either on atomic spin densities or differences in the atomic charges of the species involved in any of the three main oxidation mechanisms. The best model takes into account all three mechanisms of oxidation, single electron transfer-proton transfer (SET-PT), sequential proton loss electron transfer (SPLET) and hydrogen atom transfer (HAT), yielding excellent statistics (R(2) = 0.970, S.E. = 0.043).