I would caution people just saying HTM is supported by ‘x’ papers. As for @Zoey_Lee question, it’s neural plausible, not necessarily neurally confirmed.
If you don’t want to read every one of the cited papers, I think the main take away from neuroscience and cortical columns that HTM has clung to as its core concept is mostly just the SDR aspect of it. Everything else seems to be made to enforce that sparseness. The idea being that if two codes overlap significantly enough, then they can be considered the same or similar enough. Then essentially what you are doing for sequences is finding the similarity between the current state PLUS the previous states compared to the viewed code.
As far as being closely related to biology, I would have to disagree. HTM theory does many things that the brain does not do, solely to get the same effect as the brain. Like the global and local inhibition functions. The idea is that an interneuron plays a role on deciding which of a cluster of neurons fires. The first that fires sends a signal to the interneuron and the internueron stops the others that are connected to it from firing. What HTM does is replicates that sparse functionality by having inhibition radiuses or even a global modifier that just lets the top x% fire and all of the others don’t.
So I wouldn’t say it is closely based on biology, but it has taken lessons to try to replicate similar results that are important in what makes intelligence. But in very different ways.