Real-time detection of PCR products is enabled by the inclusion of a fluorescent reporter molecule in each reaction well that yields increased fluorescence with an increasing amount of product DNA. The fluorescence chemistries employed for this purpose include DNA-binding dyes and fluorescently labeled sequence-specific primers or probes. The measured fluorescence is proportional to the total amount of amplicon; the change in fluorescence over time is used to calculate the amount of amplicon produced in each cycle.