The establishment of genomic DNA libraries for the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and identification of individual clones by hybridisation.

The DNA of Plasmodium falciparum has been purified and fragmented with the restriction endonucleases EcoRI and HindIII. The fragments have been incorporated in vitro into derivatives of bacteriophage lambda to make libraries in which most of the parasite DNA is represented. By Southern hybridisation we have been able to recover from these libraries specific clones containing (a) repetitive DNA sequences, (b) rRNA gene(s) and (c) sequences homologous to an actin gene probe. Parasite DNA from two independent sources differs markedly in the pattern of its repetitive DNA visualised by hybridisation to our repetitive clone. By contrast, the rRNA genes of the two isolates prove to be carried on identically sized fragments.