Yangians and transvector algebras

Olshanski's centralizer construction provides a realization of the Yangian for the Lie algebra gl(n) as a subalgebra in the projective limit of a chain of centralizers in the universal enveloping algebras. We give a modified version of this construction based on a quantum analog of Sylvester's theorem. We then use it to get an algebra homomorphism from the Yangian to the transvector algebra associated with the general linear Lie algebras. The results are applied to identify the elementary representations of the Yangian by constructing their highest vectors explicitly in terms of elements of the transvector algebra.