This is lab 2 in a series of labs developed as part of a "bioinformatics for biology undergraduates" course and targeted at 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates. It is meant to be easily assessible. The lab includes some instructions that are specific to our computer lab environment but the content of the lab should be easy to adapt to other environments. This lab makes use of EMBOSS programs, prss in the FASTA package, as well as the NCBI BLAST website. I usually deliver this lab after a series of lectures discussing dotmatrix plots and sequence alignment. Students enter their answers to the questions into a quiz set up within moodle which allows for easier marking.