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PBiC-BMIF Relationship

Penn has two core facilities that deal with aspects of biomedical informatics, the Biomedical Informatics Facility (BMIF) and the Penn Bioinformatics Core (PBiC).

The Venn diagram above illustrates that there are both distinct areas where PBiC and BMIF have their distinguishing focus and some areas of overlap. BMIF deals primarily with human data, particularly with patient information and clinical data and supports clinical biomedical research (blue region). PBiC deals with data from all organisms including human data that does not contain patient information and supports basic biomedical research (yellow region). The green region indicates areas of overlap between BMIF and PBiC. Many of the programs used by these two areas of bioinformatics are the same as are many of the sources and types of data. Integrating the many different data types is also critical to both disciplines as is the use of databases (both relational and others).

If investigators have any question as to which core is most relevant for their work, they should contact either Brian Brunk (PBiC) or David Fenstermacher (BMIF) and we will help them sort out which core to utilize. Since the two cores work together on a number of projects, the answer may be to utilize both for specific aspects of their work.