Discovering Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) thanks to Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) has proven to be valuable for the human genes, however this approach is not yet documented in plants. A large collection of more than 250 000 ESTs has been constituted for sugarcane by a network of Brazilian laboratories (SUCEST project; http://sucest.lad.ic.unicamp.br/en/). As sugarcane is highly polyploid and heterozygous, several alleles are expected to be present among the redundant sequence tags of each given gene, making this EST database a potential source for SNP discovery. A detailed study of sequence polymorphism is presented here for several genes in order to test the relevance of this approach. Perspectives for more automated large-scale detection methods, as well as perspective for using this information are discussed in the particular context of polyploid sugarcane.