Build your own PCR machine

This system does precise temperature control (heating and cooling) of the reaction vessel, which is filled with your sample DNA and the right enzymes.<p>There are other systems which benefit from precise temperature control: make chocolates (getting the right consistency depends on following the right temp curve), sous-vide cooking, SMD soldering ovens, there emerges a need for generalized PID (proportional-integral-derivative) temp controllers. But hey, one's just emerged! <a href="http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2012/01/introducing-the-ospid/" rel="nofollow">http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2012/01/introducing-the-ospi...</a>

I wasn't aware what a PCR machine does and the website assumes you already know! PCR is a technique that allows scientists to create a vast quantity of a specific sequence of DNA (via <a href="http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091226132510AA7WDvN" rel="nofollow">http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091226132510AA...</a>).

Funny anecdote: the original PCR experiments were done with water baths at various temperatures. They manually moved the DNA samples from the boiling water (denaturation), to hot water (55-ish degrees, annealing) to hotter water (elongation, 70ish) and then back to the boiling water for another round of amplification.