Abstract: Dosage compensation mechanism is crucial for the balance expression of X chromosome genes, which ensures the protein or enzyme encoded by the X chromosome to be equal or almost equal expression amounts between males and females. However, different organisms have evolved distinct dosage compensation strategies, and so far three kinds of dosage compensation strategies among organisms have been reported. The first strategy is that the single male X chromosome expression is doubly activated; the second one is to inactivate one female X chromosome by leaving both sexes with one active allele; and the third one is to reduce the expression to half activity in both X chromosomes of the female. The study of dosage compensation will be useful to reveal the mechanism of regulation of X-linked genes as well as the evolution and the differentiation progress of the sex chromosome, and it can also contribute to illustrate mutation and distortion of sex chromosome. Therefore, this paper briefly reviewed and discussed the progresses and prospects of the important mechanism of dosage compensation.

Key words: dosage compensation, MSL, X chromosome, gene expression