Fig. 3

Number of common motifs between modern human and Denisovan from different genomic regions. The top 1000 motifs coming from the whole genome, core, proximal, and distal promoters as well as all introns were compared between modern human and Denisovan for motif lengths 6–10. As we can see, as the length of the motif increases, the smaller number of common motifs. This is due to the fact that the longer the motif gets, the larger the possible number of motifs, thereby making it less likely that two species have the same motif. For core promoters, it is interesting to note that modern human and Denisovan have 869 decamer motifs in common (despite there being 1,048,576 possible decamers). P-values were calculated for each genomic sub-region and each motif length, and can be seen in Additional file 5. All p-values were extremely statistically significant