The Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) project proposed by President Obama in 2011 is aimed at two times faster of developing and manufacturing of advanced materials while at a fraction of cost than before. This project promoted the rapid development of materials informatics that is the application of information technology in materials science. Material information database, integrated materials design platform and data mining methods are used to analyze and predict materials big data, and further reveal the quantitative relationships of the constituents-process-microstructure-properties in materials science, which is the gene to determine the materials properties. The design and development of advanced materials can be effectively speeded up by materials informatics. This article describes the concepts and main research areas of materials informatics. The materials information databases provide the storage and management service of materials data, such as crystal structure data, simulated and predicted data,experimental and processing data, and even patent data and various kinds of publications. Integrated materials design platform provides multiscale simulation techniques of materials research, such as the first-principles calculation, molecular dynamics, CALPHAD method, phase-field simulation and finite element analysis, etc. The calculated data can be added to the materials databases. Data Mining is an interdisciplinary field merging methods from statistics, machine learning, information science, visualization and other disciplines.It is a very useful approach to discover knowledge from materials big data produced by combination of experiments and high throughput calculation. The application of materials databases, integrated materials design platform and data mining in materials research are introduced. Especially, the framework and function of “MATGENE” integrated materials design platform built by Matclouds technology in Chengdu are also described. Finally the challenges of materials informatics in materials research are discussed.