ChIP-Seq tags represent the ends of fragments in a ChIP-DNA library and are often shifted towards the 3' direction to better represent the precise protein-DNA interaction site. The size of the shift is, however, often unknown to the experimenter. Since ChIP-DNA fragments are equally likely to be sequenced from both ends, the tag density around a true binding site should show a bimodal enrichment pattern, with Watson strand tags enriched upstream of binding and Crick strand tags enriched downstream. MACS takes advantage of this bimodal pattern to empirically model the shifting size to better locate the precise binding sites.
