Here we describe the construction of a representative YAC library for the human malarial parasite Plasmodium vivax. As P. vivax cannot be maintained continuously under laboratory conditions, the P. vivax DNA necessary 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 consists 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.