ELIXIR-IT gathers most of the excellence centres or bioinformatics in Italy and is striving to assume pivotal role for the national and international life science communities. This is reflected by the growing number of bioinformatics services, initiatives and projects supported or participated by ELIXIR-IT, including H2020 grants and a number of training efforts delivering state of the arts courses on basic and advanced topics. In this poster we highlight some of the activities