The most useful site for those curious about bioinformatics in Europe is that of the EBI (http://www.ebi.ac.uk). The site is extensive, with a newsletter, job vacancies and a lot of educational material as well as further links, including one to its parent organization EMBL (http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/). It may just be my software, but I cannot always get through to this site.

A good starting point for a tour of European national centres is the page of the European Science Foundation, which provides links to members. For example, (http://www.esf.c-strasbourg.Fr/members/map.htm) will take you to French members, including the CNRS (http://www.cnrs.Fr/). There is an English version of this site. One can also reach UK sites, including that for the BBSRC (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/). Finding information about bioinformatics on these sites requires some searching.

Also at European level is a page from the science directorate (http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg12/biotech/biot-n.htm). This provides links to biotechnology sites, including the European Federation of Biotechnology.

In the United Kingdom, the Wellcome centre provides a list of job vacancies at (http://wisdom.wellcome.ac.uk/). The page gives the option of searching for jobs in a given area, but I got no results.