Installing the Common Mechanism sequence screening software requires a computing environment which can run shell scripts and Python with adequate storage space for the databases used (~1 Gb for the curated biorisk and benign databases, ~600 Gb for the standard protein and nucleotide databases used for similarity search, which will already be installed in many bioinformatics computing environments). It is also possible to install and run the program with Biocontainer (Docker image). Since the release of this document, the software has only been extensively tested in Linux computing environments, although trials in Windows and MacOS demonstrated its capacity to run in these operating systems as well. We expect to make available an API for testing small numbers of sequences in the near future.