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Updated: Sep 11, 2026
Applications of Liquid-Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry in Natural Products Research: Tropane Alkaloids as a Case Study
Published on: March 8, 2024
Shape-Restricted Detection of Natural Product Hormesis: A Re-Analysis of Complex Botanical Mixtures
Ying Jin1, Cynthia Rider2, Ruili Huang3
1National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, Durham, NC, USA.
Introduction:
Botanical supplements are consumed to improve health despite the mystery of their mechanisms. One possible effect is hormesis, defined as a beneficial and stimulatory health effect at a low dose and detrimental effect at a high dose, or vice versa. Hormesis is usually discovered by manually examining the shape of dose-response curves, which is not scalable to the large number of chemical-assay combinations found in high-throughput screening (HTS) results.
Methods:
We proposed a semi-automatic statistical testing procedure to quickly evaluate large-scale dose-response data, accompanied by an R package shorm for easy implementation. The nonparametric shape tests are more flexible with few assumptions. We also developed a new visualization method to represent the test conclusions and uncertainties simultaneously. This representation highlights both significant and ambiguous findings for efficient examination.
Results:
We applied this method to a data set of 4860 chemical-assay pairs and identified 561 (12%) dose-response curves showing statistically significant hormesis.
Conclusion:
Our discovery of hormetic curves is in line with estimates of hormetic behaviors in dose-response repositories like Tox21. Our proposed method has been effective in screening for hormesis from large-scale dose-response data, and the visualization method effectively facilitates the interpretation of test results.
