What does a PCR machine do?
The thermocycler, or polymerase chain reaction-PCR machine, is a low-cost and high-efficiency technique for amplifying short portions of DNA or RNA. PCR uses the concepts of nucleic acid replication and complementary nucleic acid hybridization to create specific target DNA/RNA sequences exponentially by a factor of 107 in a couple of hours. The polymerase chain reaction process can be classified into three stages: 1. Denaturing – In this first process the DNA is heated into 2 separate pieces of single-strand DNA at around 94-95°C. 2. Annealing – In the second process, the temperature is lowered, which enables the primers to bind DNA and initiate the polymerization at 50-56°C.