Given a sonication size (bandwidth) and a high-confidence fold-enrichment (mfold), MACS slides 2bandwidth windows across the genome to find regions with tags more than mfold enriched relative to a random tag genome distribution. MACS randomly samples 1,000 of these high-quality peaks, separates their Watson and Crick tags, and aligns them by the midpoint between their Watson and Crick tag centers (Figure 1a) if the Watson tag center is to the left of the Crick tag center. The distance between the modes of the Watson and Crick peaks in the alignment is defined as 'd', and MACS shifts all the tags by d/2 toward the 3' ends to the most likely protein-DNA interaction sites.
