Details of functional speciation within gene families can be difficult to identify using standard multiple sequence alignment (MSA) methods. The evolutionary trace (ET) was developed as a visualization tool to combine MSA, phylogenetic and structural data for identification of functional sites in proteins. The method has been successful in extracting evolutionary details of functional surfaces in a number of biological systems and modifications of the method are useful in creating hypotheses about the function of previously unannotated genes. We wish to facilitate the graphical interpretation of disparate data types through the creation of flexible software implementations.
