Dr. Agata Kalita wins the prestigious Elisabeth-Gateff Prize 2025 from the German Genetics Society (GfG) for her amazing work on sex chromosome dosage compensation in insects!
In her doctoral thesis, she describes the discovery and characterisation of SOA, the master regulator of dosage compensation in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes - the key vectors of malaria. Dr. Kalita demonstrated that SOA binds to the promoters of active X-linked genes in males, upregulates their expression, and its loss causes male developmental delay. Surprisingly, the loss of DC in mosquitoes is not lethal, unlike what was previously observed in model organisms. Furthermore, she summarised the knowledge about the DC status across insects and proposed a framework to uncover DC factors in non-model insect species.
The GfG congratulates Dr. Agata Kalita, who will receive the award at the upcoming GfG Symposium “Epigenetics & Chromatin” on September 26th, 2025 in Giessen (https://express.converia.de/frontend/index.php?sub=1834).
