The methods are widely applicable to other DNA sequence clustering problems. Someone may obtain contradicting results with a new algorithm. In such a case, rerunning our scripts on the same or new data may help elucidate the source of the differences between the results.
This article was meant to be entirely reproducible, with the data and code published alongside the article. It is however not embedded within a container (e.g. Docker). Will it past the reproducibility test tomorrow? next year? I'm curious.
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.