The French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB; https://www.france-bioinformatique.fr/) is the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure that provides support, deploys services, organizes training and carries out innovative developments for life sciences communities. IFB is also the French node of the European bioinformatics infrastructure ELIXIR (https://elixir-europe.org/). IFB began to operate in summer 2013, and currently federates 36 platforms of services and research teams. The 2019-2020 activity report summarises the achievements and ongoing projects. In the exceptional context of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemics, these two years were particularly active for all our platforms and teams. In addition to the pursuit of our usual activities, IFB established a COVID-19 task force, and actively contributed to the national and international efforts in fighting against the pandemics. The infrastructure received a very positive evaluation and its funding was renewed by the French Ministry of Research (MESRI) and by the National Research Agency (ANR) until 2025, and was reinforced by a strong involvement of our supporting research organisms (CNRS, Inserm, INRAE, CEA).

IFB is supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-INBS-0013).