Obstructions to homomorphisms between homogeneous C*-algebras

We develop a method to find new obstructions to the existence of homomorphisms between homogeneous C*-algebras with prescribed behavior on K-theory. As an application, we give a complete answer to a problem posed by Blackadar in 1993 concerning the existence of unital homomorphisms between algebras of matrix-valued functions on even spheres which are injective on K_0: we show that if n, d, k, r are natural numbers and k is not in the range n, n+1, ..., n+d-1, then there is no unital homomorphism from C (S^{2n}, M_r) to C (S^{2k}, M_{dr}) which is injective on K_0.