The primers were selected from the nonhomologous regions of the BoNT types A, B, E, and F gene by using the Primer 3 software (S. Rozen and H. J. Skaletsky, Primer 3, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Mass. [http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/genome_software/other/primer3.html], 1998).