Metadata annotation is key to reproducibility in sequencing experiments. Reproducing this research using the scripts provided will also show the current level of annotation in years since 2015 when the paper was published.
Paper and codes+data have been published 4 years ago, will they still work? I always try to release data and codes to reproduce my papers, but I seldom receive feedback. It would be useful to have comments from a reproducers' team, in order to improve sharing for future research (I switched from MATLAB to Python already).