This is an interesting piece of work which will surely stimulate some discussion. It remains to be seen how general this phenomenon is in nervous systems, but already now we will have to re-think our general picture of how information is transmitted within neurons.
As one of the reviewers put it: "The evidence presented by the authors that ceramide production has some central role in the transmission of excitation without action potentials is very good. I can imagine that many readers would choose not to believe the conclusions of the paper, since they provide a significant challenge to our usual way of thinking about neural conduction. However, any such reader would be very hard pressed to come up with a better explanation of these carefully performed and analysed experiments."
