"any unspecific or side effects of using chloral hydrate?"

to whom?   to cells/tissues/cultures or human ??

Regards, Wolfgang

to cells ... in other words are there any cellular signalling affected by chloral hydrate? how specific is it in removing primary cilia? 

Thanks for the response 

Dear Sami,

unfortunately up to now I knew being a kind of chemical used in the last century (and perhaps also this century)  for (special sort of) fixation of special tissues (e. g.: use of chloral hydrate formaldehyde fixative solution in enzyme histochemistry, or as ingredient of specific staining solutions like aceto-iron-h(a)ematoxylin-chloral-hydrate for chromosome staining ), or some specific medical method / treatment like (children, adult),    but had no idea about a possible use as a for primary cilia in cell biology. So I am keen either to find any source for that task in my and other files/sources,  or to learn from what others hopefully will post in this thread, respectively. Nevertheless, it would be perhaps of benefit to get a bit more detailed information about your thoughts.....

Best wishes, good luck and regards, Wolfgang

Overall, the literature suggests that chloral hydrate is not very cytotoxic at the concentrations that cause deciliation (about 4 mM).  It appears to work somewhat similarly to other deciliating agents such as dibucaine in that cilia may not be released unless there is some mechanical agitation.  In Paramecium, chloral hydrate-deciliation is followed by rapid sealing and re-growth of cilia (e.g., D.L. Nelson, Meth Cell Bio. 47:17 (1995); K. Dunlap, J. Physiol. 271:119 (1977), but that may not be the case in all cell types (e.g., sea urchin embryos; see A. Chakrabarti et al., Cell Tiss. Res. 293:453 (1998)).  The long exposures to chloral hydrate used in some papers for deciliation (e.g., H.A. Praetorious and K. R. Spring, J. Membr. Biol. 191:69 (2003) may be because they did not agitate?