The amount of steady-state level RNA complementary to the X-linked salivary gland secretion polypeptide gene Sgs-4 was measured in male and female third-instar larvae carrying one or two doses of a wild-type allele of the gene. RNA levels were found to be compensated in normal one-dose males and two-dose females and to be dosage-dependent within each sex. The presence of mutant alleles of male-less (mle) was found to reduce the level of Sgs-4 transcripts in males. These results support the contentions that dosage compensation is mediated by regulating the level of X-linked gene transcripts and that a product of the mle+ gene is involved in this process.