The EUCOMM consortium is a member of the International Knockout Mouse Consortium, (an organisation including the EUCOMM, KOMP, NorCOMM and TIGM consortia) which reflects a commitment to share and promote their products and technology with the international research community.
[3][4] The mutations introduced in the ES Cells are conditional: this means that the initial mutation can be modified - by the application of particular DNA-altering enzymes (site specific recombinases) to make the knockout initially latent in the genome.
This conditionality is a key property of the entire resource, and it allows a more nuanced study of the effects of the gene-knockout.
The purpose of this library is to enable the mouse research community to rapidly create mutant mice, by The broad aim of the project is to facilitate research into gene function in mice (and so by inference in humans) by removing the high technical entry barrier of making the mutant ES Cells.
The distribution of EUCOMM products is being handled by a separate non-commercial organisation, the European Mouse Mutant Cell Repository.