Predicting the minimal inhibitory concentration of fluoroquinolones for Escherichia coli using an accumulation model.

The objective of this study is to evaluate whether the accumulation model developed by Zarfl et al. (2008) could be used to predict the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) of a group of antibacterial fluoroquinolones (FQs) for Escherichia coli (E. coli). Our model, which is based on the "Fick-Nernst-Planck" equation and the permeability of the neutral and charged species as well as the physicochemical parameters of the FQs, could predict 1/MIC90 using a linear function. It is envisaged that in the drug development projects of new FQs, the accumulation model described in this study could be utilized as an effective tool to enable early assessment of MIC value using physiochemical parameters.