Stable operational taxonomic units for studying microbial ecology He et al. Table 1: Multiple comparisons of unstable sequences between different clustering methods after kruskal-wallis test. CL SL AL DGC AGC Dereplication Closed-ref T: P<0.05 F: P>0.05. SL F AL T T DGC T F F AGC T T F T Dereplication T T T T T Closed-ref T T T T T F Open-ref T T T T F F F Table 2: Multiple comparisons of MCC values between different clustering methods after kruskal-wallis test. CL SL AL DGC AGC Dereplication Closed-ref T: P<0.05 F: P>0.05. SL T AL F T DGC F F T AGC T F T F Dereplication T T T T T Closed-ref T T T T T F Open-ref T F T T F F F