The 6700 workstation is a specially engineered, fully automated laboratory robotic instrument that performs nucleic acid extraction and setup of analysis reaction plates. The ABI PRISM® 6700 workstations automated setup can help launch projects that would be cost-prohibitive without automation. Thus, users spend more time processing and analyzing data rather than executing routine assay steps. The workstation automates each step of nucleic acid purification to meet the analytical requirements of the nucleic acid analysis market. Most important, the effect of automation at this highly manual stage will help accelerate all future stages of users lab work, from research and development to drug discovery. The ABI PRISM® 6700 workstation is ready to work with existing sequence detection systems, such as the ABI PRISM® 7700 and GeneAmp® 5700 systems, to support real-time PCR. The 6700 workstation caps the PCR tray with an optical cover, so the entire tray is ready to drop into the ABI PRISM® 7700 system and run without further physical manipulation. The same database format monitors and controls all data and information about samples on the ABI PRISM® 6700 and ABI PRISM® 7700 instruments. As a result, the software running the ABI PRISM® 6700 workstation is able to transfer information about trays over to the ABI PRISM® 7700 instrument. Users never have to re-enter information. Just physically move the tray, electronically copy the information, and run.