The E. coli KD263 strain is a derivative of BW40119 strain described earlier (28 (link)). It contains the cas3 gene under the control of the lacUV5 promoter and the casABCDE12 operon under the araBp8 promoter control. The KD263 strains harbors a single genetically modified CRISPR cassette with two repeats and a single g8 spacer described earlier (14 (link)). KD263 was transformed with a pG8_C1T plasmid, a derivative of the pT7blue cloning vector harboring a 209-bp fragment of the M13 bacteriophage DNA containing the g8 protospacer (28 (link)). The protospacer sequence harbors a C to T change at the position of +1 that renders CRISPR interference by the g8 spacer containing crRNA ineffective (14 (link)). KD263 cells transformed with pG8_C1T were grown overnight at 37°C in Luria-Bertani (LB) broth supplemented with 100 μg/ml ampicillin. Aliquots of the culture were diluted 200-fold into six individual tubes with fresh LB broth without ampicillin and supplemented with IPTG (isopropyl β-D-1 thiogalactopyranoside) and arabinose to the final concentration 1 mM each. The cultures were grown at 37°C overnight. The six individual cultures were mixed and genomic DNA was isolated from the pooled cultures. The cells were lyzed by 2-min incubation with 1 mg/ml lysozyme and DNA was purified by phenol, phenol/chloroform, chloroform extractions followed by ethanol precipitation. CRISPR expansion was monitored by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 20 μl reactions containing 20–50 ng genomic DNA with primers matched the CRISPR leader sequence and g8 spacer: Ec_LDR-F (5′-AAGGTTGGTGGGTTGTTTTTATGG-3′) and M13g8 (5′-GGATCGTCACCCTCAGCAGCG-3′) using Phusion High-Fidelity DNA Polymerase (New England Biolabs). Six independent amplification reactions were pooled, PCR products corresponding to expanded CRISPR cassette were gel purified using QIAquick Gel Extraction Kit (QIAGEN) and sequenced with MySeq Illumina System at Moscow State University Genomics facility as described (31 (link)).