The experimental determination of toxicological properties of commercial chemicals being costly and time consuming process, there is a need to develop mathematical predictive tool to theoretically quantify such properties. In this background, we have modeled toxicity of nitrobenzene derivatives to Tetrahymena pyriformis using extended topochemical atom (ETA) indices recently introduced by us (Roy and Ghosh, 2003). We have also modeled the toxicity data using other topological descriptors (Balaban J, kappa shape indices, connectivity indices, Wiener index) and two physicochemical variables (AlogP98, MolRef) and compared the ETA models with non-ETA ones. Principal component factor analysis was used as the data-preprocessing step to reduce the dimensionality of the data matrix and identify the important variables that are devoid of collinearities. Multiple linear regression analyses show that the best non-ETA model involves (size), halogen and additional nitro substitutions in the nitrobenzene ring and negative contributions of the substituents like methyl and hydroxymethyl groups to the toxicity. An attempt to use non-ETA descriptors along with the ETA ones slightly improves the quality in comparison to the best ETA model. Interestingly, the ETA model developed by us for the nitrobenzene toxicity is comparable to the previously reported models on the same data set (Estrada et al., 2001;Cronin et al., 1998). Thus, it appears that the ETA descriptors have significant potential in QSAR/QSPR/ QSTR studies, which warrants extensive evaluation.