Prediction of membrane spanning segments in beta-barrel outer membrane proteins 
(OMP) and their topology is an important problem in structural and functional 
genomics. In this work, we propose a method based on radial basis networks for 
predicting the number of beta-strands in OMPs and identifying their membrane 
spanning segments. Our method showed a leave-one-out cross validation accuracy 
of 96% in a set of 28 OMPs, which have the range of 8-22 beta-strand segments. 
The beta-strand segments in OMPs and the residues in membrane spanning segments 
are correctly predicted with the accuracy of 96% and 87%, respectively. We have 
developed a web server, TMBETAPRED-RBF for predicting the transmembrane 
beta-strands from amino acid sequence and it is available at 
http://rbf.bioinfo.tw/~sachen/tmrbf.html. We suggest that our method could be an 
effective tool for predicting the membrane spanning regions and topology of 
beta-barrel membrane proteins.