CONSTRUCTION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A PLASMODIUM-VIVAX GENOMIC LIBRARY IN YEAST ARTIFICIAL CHROMOSOMES

Here we describe the construction of a representative YAC library for the human malarial parasite Plasmodium vivax. As P. vivax cannot be ma intained continuously under laboratory conditions, tile P. vivax DNA n ecessary for the library construction was isolated from a single human patient presenting himself with vivax malaria to a local hospital in the Brazilian Amazon. Thus, this YAC library is the first of its kind to be generated from patient-derived material. The YAC library consist s of 560 clones with an average insert size of 180 kb. Of 9 published P. vivax genes, 8 were found to be present in the library. In addition , 12 P. vivax telomeric YAC clones were identified. (C) 1997 Academic Press.