Electrophoretic separation of double-stranded DNA mols., such as RFLP fragments or polymerase chain reaction products, is usually accomplished in agarose, polyacrylamide, or composite agarose-polyacrylamide gels. Large-scale, high-resolution DNA fragment anal. (e.g., mapping) requires an affordable, fully automated high-throughput agarose gel-electrophoresis-based separation device that enables rapid, high-performance separations in a wide mol.-weight range. The present study describes a system that greatly enhances the productivity of DNA fragment anal. by automating the current manual procedure and also reducing the separation time and human intervention from sample loading to data anal.