The line was made from L3 prothoracic leg discs (Currie et al., 1988). Transcriptome analysis suggests similarity to cells in the tibia or femur region of a leg disc (Cherbas et al., 2011).

CME L1 cells are male, by criteria of the expression levels of roX gene, msl-2 and traF, and the splicing patterns of tra and Sxl (Lee et al., 2014). The assignment was confirmed by roX gene expression and Sxl splicing (Stoiber et al., 2016, G3)