I'll take it! My SPS are nice & bright, no cloudiness here either.
More good info from RC:
Ascorbate is a cofactor in several enzymatic pathways and can also scavenge free radicals so is used by the cell as an antioxidant the only pathway I could locate in my biochem text was about collagen production, which I'm guessing is not relevant to corals. (Edit: I looked this up, soft corals, including zoanthids ARE made up of collagen and it turns out that in the literature ascorbate plays an important role in the stimulation of collagen production, which would contribute to cell growth and repair).
Upon looking at the ascorbate molecule again, I realize that it does not look anything like glucose the only similarity is that it they both are made up of C,H, and O, but this is true of a large percentage of biomolecules.
I won't give you the chemical differences without speaking with you because they're too numerous and involve too much chemistry to explain over gchat.
There is not going to be a biochemical pathway for the transformation of ascorbic acid to glucose because this would require an energy input and would be inefficient, also as I said before, cells do not use a compound that has a specific and important biological function as an energy (also termed carbon) source. This is because the production or import of this compound into the cell is highly regulated and also because these compounds are required in smaller quantities and are also found in smaller quantities in the environment than preferred carbon sources.
If you want to understand this concept more thoroughly, you will have to invest some time in reading the chapters in a biology textbook that concern cell metabolism and regulation. I can also tell you that glucose is not broken down into ascorbic acid because glucose is broken down in a well-defined pathway you can look up glycolysis in a text book if you want, at any rate there is no good reason to believe that vitamin C acts as anything other than an antioxidant because this is one of its major functions in all cells, whereas its metabolism for the purpose of energy production is never reported in texts or literature.
Follow up on ascorbate and collagen production:
Here is a paper with the finding that ascorbic acid significantly increases the production of collagen in both a soft and hard coral. The two species in this article are Xenia elongate (pulsing xenia) and Montipora digitata, both common corals kept by reefers.
So ascorbate could be acting on two fronts. 1) An antioxidant that neutralizes toxic oxygen radicals produced in photosynthesis and 2) In growth, acting as a stimulant in collagen production, the major structural component of soft corals.
Here is the citation, again if you would like the pdf please let me know.
Helman, Yael, Natale, Frank, Sherrell, Robert M., et al. Extracellular matrix production and calcium carbonate precipitation by coral cells in vitro 2008
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/105/1/54
