Abstract
Overlapping genes are commonplace in viruses and play an important role in their function and evolution. For these genes, molecular coevolution may be seen as a mechanism to decrease the evolutionary constraints of amino acid positions in the overlapping regions and to tolerate or compensate unfavorable mutations. Tracing these mutational sites, could help to gain insight on the direct or indirect effect of the mutations in the corresponding overlapping proteins. In the past, coevolution analysis has been used to identify residue pairs and coevolutionary signatures within or between proteins that served as markers of physical interactions and/or functional relationships. Coevolution in OVerlapped sequences by Tree analysis (COVTree) is a web server providing the online analysis of coevolving amino-acid pairs in overlapping genes, where residues might be located inside or outside the overlapping region. COVTree is designed to handle protein families with various characteristics, among which those that typically display a small number of highly conserved sequences. It is based on BIS2, a fast version of the coevolution analysis tool Blocks in Sequences (BIS). COVTree provides a rich and interactive graphical interface to ease biological interpretation of the results and it is openly accessible at http://www.lcqb.upmc.fr/COVTree/.