The Common Mechanism is part of an emerging ecosystem of nucleic acid screening tools. DNA synthesis providers building their own screening tools often rely on BLAST searches that are vulnerable to evasion strategies and fail to keep pace with evolving taxonomy and policy requirements, and IBBIS collaborates with other tool developers to increase the fraction of global orders that are screened according to best practices.

The core differences between the Common Mechanism and other tools in the ecosystem are:

• Free, open-source software and databases. The commec software package, and its associated databases are fully public and open-source.
• No data transfer. Intellectual property embedded in customer sequences can make providers reluctant to outsource screening to third-party services. The commec software is designed to be installed locally by individual providers, lowering barriers to access while protecting customer data.
• Globally accessible, internationally designed. The software was designed by an international technical consortium and incorporates screening standards from every continent.
• Customer screening. We also offer methods for verifying customer legitimacy, developed with a focus on serving international customers.

The commec sequence screening package is free to use, designed to avoid false positives, and provides decision support to reduce the amount of time needed to review flagged orders. It runs locally, with no data transferred from users to IBBIS. It is more robust against screening evasion attempts (including AI-generated sequences) than basic BLAST-based approaches and meets or exceeds industry-standard performance benchmarks.