The fractionally charged quasiparticles appearing in the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall plateau are predicted to have an extra non-local degree of freedom, known as topological charge.  I will show how this topological charge can block the tunnelling of these particles, and how such 'topological blockade' can be used to readout their topological charge.  Moreover I will examine more in general the role that interactions between non-Abelian anyons play in topological quantum computation and how these interactions can be exploited to implement braiding operators.