Polychlorinated dibenzothiophenes(PCDTs) are a group of important persistent organic pollutants.In the present study,geometrical optimization and electrostatic potential calculations have been performed for all 135 PCDTs congeners at the B3LYP/6-31G* level of theory.By means of the VSMP(variable selection and modeling based on prediction) program,one optimal descriptor(molecular polarizability,α) was selected to develop a QSRR model for the prediction of gas chromatographic retention indices(GC-RI) of PCDTs.The estimated correlation coefficients(r2) and LOO-validated correlation coefficients(q2),all more than 0.99,were built by multiple linear regression,which shows a good estimation ability and stability of the models.A prediction power for the external samples was validated by the model built from the training set with 17 polychlorinated dibenzothiophenes.