Nucleosome or translational positioning indicates the position of a population of nucleosomes in relation to DNA, and considers a specific reference nucleosome point like its start, dyad or end [143]. Translational positioning is reflected in the standard deviation of the population positioning curve, and is used to distinguish between strongly and poorly positioned nucleosomes [143]. Translational positioning can be further characterized as absolute, based on the probability of a nucleosome starting at a specific base x, and conditional, based on the probability of a nucleosome starting within an extended region with center base pair x[56]. Nucleosome occupancy on the other hand, measures density of nucleosome population and is reflected in the area under the population positioning curve [143]. Nucleosome occupancy is tightly linked to chromatin accessibility, and depends on the degree a genomic site is occupied by nucleosomes in all genomic configurations [56]. A number of methods have been applied to measure nucleosome positioning [48, 58, 111, 144] and occupancy [48, 145] from MNase-seq data based on the number of sequence reads that start at each base pair, assessed for
