As developments in sequencing technology popularize ChIP-Seq, we propose a novel algorithm, MACS, for its data analysis. MACS offers four important utilities for predicting protein-DNA interaction sites from ChIP-Seq. First, MACS improves the spatial resolution of the predicted sites by empirically modeling the distance d and shifting tags by d/2. Second, MACS uses a dynamic λlocal parameter to capture local biases in the genome and improves the robustness and specificity of the prediction. It is worth noting that in addition to ChIP-Seq, λlocal can potentially be applied to other high throughput sequencing applications, such as copy number variation and digital gene expression, to capture regional biases and estimate robust fold-enrichment. Third, MACS can be applied to ChIP-Seq experiments without controls, and to those with controls with improved performance. Last but not least, MACS is easy to use and provides detailed information for each peak, such as genome coordinates, p-value, FDR, fold_enrichment, and summit (peak center).
