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Automated equipment designed to process high-molecular-weight nucleotide polymers (i.e., nucleic acids), the most characteristic components of which are DNA and RNA. These processors can perform one or more of a great variety of processes on nucleic acids, such as purifying nucleic acids (e.g., DNA, RNA, mRNA), the samples of which are usually obtained from body fluid specimens; combining the building block base pairs in a \'cocktail mix\' to make a chain (i.e., synthesizing); recombining two complementary strands (i.e., hybridization); increasing the number of samples through repetitive cycles (replication or amplification, such as polymerase chain reaction); and determining the order of the base pairs in the amplified chain (i.e., sequencing).
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