Kaplinsky, J. & Arnaout, R. Nat. Commun. 7, 11881 (2016).

The human adaptive immune system can generate a staggering range of T and B cell clones that express different immune receptors and antibody sequences. Many sequencing-based methods seek to profile immune diversity, but the high complexity and predominance of rare clones make it difficult to guess at the full repertoire on the basis of sampling. Kaplinsky and Arnaout describe an algorithm based on expectation maximization that reconstructs the clone-size distribution of entire immune repertoires from limited samples. Their Recon software estimates different diversity indices such as species richness and entropy and enables measurement accuracy to be quantified. It also allows researchers to estimate the coverage needed to confidently predict differences between two samples.