The other interesting thing about this is that nitrates are/were considered "best absorbed" by academic research. This is really just a remnant of the overly reductive way plants have been studied in labs that is often times completely divorced from how plants live naturally.
Beyond the biophysics of different types of nitrogen like pH, nitrate has to be reduced in order for it to be metabolized by a plant. Based on that alone Nitrate requires more energy to metabolize compared to ammonium and amino acid N. Since high nitrate formulas need more energy to reduce them via nitrate reductase you are highly likely to experience poor plant performance if you aren't making sure your plant is getting the top end of light exposure.
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The location of nitrate assimilation can have significant implications for the plant energy budget. For example, if light is saturating, leaf nitrate assimilation will obviously have a lower energy cost than that in the root, because the reducing equivalents and ATP for nitrate assimilation are obtained without any decrease in the rate of CO2 fixation. If light is limiting, leaf nitrate assimilation and carbon dioxide fixation will directly compete for ATP and reductants generated by photosynthetic electron transport (Canvin and Atkins, 1974), leading to a decrease in CO2 fixation. However, this is still energetically more efficient than synthesizing sucrose, transporting it to the roots, and subsequently respiring it in order to generate ATP and NAD(P)H to drive the assimilation of nitrate.
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Metabolic and Signaling Aspects Underpinning the Regulation of Plant Carbon Nitrogen Interactions
Excessive nitrates are also implicated in increased susceptibility to disease but that's a whole other conversation... Either way I'm happy with this new formula and will be buying it once my regular klite runs out.
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