ELIXIR unites Europe’s foremost life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the increasing volume of data being generated by publicly funded research. Its primary objective is to coordinate, integrate and sustain bioinformatics resources across its Member States, facilitating seamless access to essential services for researchers in academia and industry in Europe and beyond. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation comprising 21 Member countries, one intergovernmental organisation (the European Molecular Biology Laboratory) and three Observer countries (Cyprus, Austria and Romania). It brings together over 240 research organisations and 800 experts, including bioinformaticians, computer scientists and professional support staff in Nodes. The UK is the host country of ELIXIR, which operates on a 'Hub and Nodes' model. ELIXIR's coordination function is carried out by the ELIXIR Hub, situated at the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, UK. As each ELIXIR Member country establishes a Node, these together form a distributed infrastructure within that country and coordinate activities with other Nodes across Europe. ELIXIR Nodes facilitate the delivery of ELIXIR's services to end-users. Collectively, ELIXIR Nodes provide over 500 bioinformatics resources, which include databases, software tools and workflows, registries, training resources, interoperability resources, standards, compute resources, guidelines and best practices and data management support. By facilitating access to these resources for hundreds of thousands of scientists globally, ELIXIR contributes to managing the overwhelming volume of data in life sciences, enabling more efficient data storage, transfer, and analysis. ELIXIR operates on the basis of a five-year Scientific Programme, which describes the scientific and technical activities that will be implemented in that period. ELIXIR connects, coordinates and integrates the bioinformatics services run by ELIXIR Nodes across Europe, by implementing projects that connect ELIXIR experts and resources and which are funded through the budget provided by Member States. Some of the outcomes derived from these coordination activities at ELIXIR include: the creation of a coordinated network of supercomputer services that makes it easier for scientists to manage the ‘data deluge’ currently experienced in the life sciences, thereby enabling scientists across Europe to more easily and efficiently use existing facilities to store, transfer and analyse huge datasets. Additionally, ELIXIR partners are active partners in a significant number of EU-funded projects, typically providing data management and infrastructure expertise. ELIXIR is active in a number of scientific domains across the life sciences, including: rare diseases, human genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, biodiversity, food and nutrition, plant sciences, microbiome, toxicology and single-cell omics.