Xenohormesis is a hypothesis that posits that certain molecules such as plant polyphenols, which indicate stress in the plants, can have benefits for another organism (heterotrophs) that consumes it. Or in simpler terms, xenohormesis is interspecies hormesis. The expected benefits include improve lifespan and fitness, by activating the animal's cellular stress response.
Xenohormesis is a hypothesis that posits that certain molecules such as plant polyphenols, which indicate stress in the plants, can have benefits for another organism (heterotrophs) that consumes it. Or in simpler terms, xenohormesis is interspecies hormesis. The expected benefits include improve lifespan and fitness, by activating the animal's cellular stress response.
This may be useful to evolve, as it gives possible cues about the state of the environment. If the plants an animal is eating have increased polyphenol content, it means the plant is under stress and may signal famines. Using the chemical cues the heterotophs could preemptively prepare and defend itself before conditions worsen. A possible example may be resveratrol, which is famously found in red wine, which modulates over two dozen receptors and enzymes in mammals. thumb|168x168px|Cinnamon Xenohormesis could also explain several phenomena seen in the ethno-pharmaceutical (traditional medicine) side of things. Such as in the case of cinnamon, which in a few studies has been found to have an effect on lipid, glucose, and HbA1c levels in type 2 diabetes, but upon meta analysis was found to have no significant effect. One group of authors suggested this might be caused by the cinnamon used in one study differing from the other in xenohormetic properties.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).