The kit is intended for manual and automated isolation of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) from a wide range of samples. Processing time for the preparation of 96 samples is about 40 minutes. The kit requires no phenol/chloroform extraction or alcohol precipitation and eliminates the need for repeated centrifugation, vacuum filtration or column separation. It allows safe handling of potentially infectious samples and is designed to avoid sample-to-sample cross-contaminations. The obtained nucleic acids can be used directly as template for downstream applications such as PCR, qPCR, qRT-PCR or any kind of enzymatic reaction.