Eukaryotic DNA in its most compact form consists of arrays of nucleosomes, which represent the smallest subunits of chromatin. Each nucleosome comprises a large composite protein (histone octamer) bound to a 147 bp-segment of DNA. We investigate the influence of the DNA sequence on the occurrence of histone binding. Results from several independent in vivo and in vitro experiments indicate that dinucleotides consisting of a combination of bases adenine and thymine act as bending enhancers in the process of DNA winding around histone octamers. This results in an oscillatory behavior of the average AT/TA/AA/TT content on DNA of stably positioned nucleosomes. In addition, the moving average of these oscillations does not stay constant across the length of the core particle. By simulating a selection experiment, we recovered two distinct shape modulations of the nucleosomal AT/TA/AA/TT distribution in our results, both of which are very similar to the shapes observed in experiments.