Hormesis, the beneficial effects of mild stress exposures, is a well documented phenomenon in a range of organisms. The documentation mainly relies on relatively simple and controlled laboratory investigations. In order to better understand hormesis and predict the outcome of more complex and realistic conditions, a number of key issues should be investigated in much more detail. One obstacle i...

Insects are ubiquitous, crucial components of almost all terrestrial and fresh water ecosystems. In agricultural settings they are subjected to, intentionally or unintentionally, an array of synthetic pesticides and other chemical stressors. These ecological underpinnings, the amenability of insects to laboratory and field experiments, and our strong knowledgebase in insecticide toxicology, mak...

Homeopathy claims a curative reaction from small doses of a substance, high doses of which cause symptoms similar to those the patient is suffering from. Hormesis is a concept of biphasic dose-response to different pharmacological and toxicological agents. According to this concept, a small dose of a noxious agent can exert a beneficial action. A hypothesis is defended here that hormesis as a g...

The effects of calorie restriction without malnutrition seem to possess many beneficial effects in numerous disease states. Recently, studies related to calorie restriction mimetics that biochemically mimic the effects of calorie restriction are also becoming increasingly popular. Both calorie restriction and calorie restriction mimetics trigger an adaptive response reminiscent of mild-stress o...

Instrument choice--the comparison of technology standards, performance standards, taxes and tradable permits--has been a major topic in environmental law and environmental economics. Most analyses assume that emissions and health effects are positively and linearly related. If they are not, this complicates the instrument choice analysis. This article analyses the effects of a nonlinear dose-re...

The stimulatory effect of low concentrations of toxic chemicals on organismal metabolism, referred to as hormesis, has been found to be common in the widely used luminescence bioassay. This paper aims to study the hormesis phenomenon in both marine and freshwater luminescent bacteria, named Photobacterium phosphorem and Vibrio qinghaiensis. The effects of Cu (II), Zn (II), Cd (II) and Cr (VI) o...

Chlorophyll and carotenoid content (ChCar), lipid peroxidation (LP) and growth parameters (GP) in plants are often used for environmental pollution estimation. However, the nonmonotonic dose-response dependences (hormesis and paradoxical effects) of these indices are insufficiently explored following exposure to different pollutants. In this experiment, we studied nonmonotonic changes in ChCar,...

In the paradigm of drug administration, determining the correct dosage of a therapeutic is often a challenge. Several drugs have been noted to demonstrate contradictory effects per se at high and low doses. This duality in function of a drug at different concentrations is known as hormesis. Therefore, it becomes necessary to study these biphasic functions in order to understand the mechanistic ...

Hormesis has aroused much attention during the past two decades and may have great implications on many fields, including toxicology and risk assessment. However, the observation of hormesis remains challenged under laboratory conditions. To determine favorable conditions under which to observe hormesis, we investigated the hormetic responses of Escherichia coli (E. coli) upon exposure of diffe...

A recent report (Calabrese et al., Mutat. Res. 726 (2011) 91-97) concluded that an analysis of Ames test mutagenicity data provides evidence of hormesis in mutagenicity dose-response relationships. An examination of the data used in this study and the conclusions regarding hormesis reveal a number of concerns regarding the analyses and possible misinterpretations of the Salmonella data. The cla...