To provide a starting point to facilitate certain biotechnological approaches Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) sequencing was chosen to rapidly survey switchgrass genes. 11,990 individual sequences from stem, leaf, crown, and callus cDNA libraries of the switchgrass cv. “Kanlow” were deposited into the dbEST division of genbank. After clustering, these sequences represented a total of 7810 tentatively unique genes. Blast similarity searches to SwissProt, and GenBank non-redundant protein, and nucleotide databases were performed and a total of 79% of the 7810 TUGs were similar to other protein or nucleotide sequences with an e-value threshold of <10^-10 for blastx. Of these 27% were most similar to hypothetical or unknown proteins of plant origin. The EST sequence resources for switchgrass we have generated should provide a readily available inventory of genes for further research as well as sequence data that can be used to discover and develop gene-linked markers such as microsatellites or SNPs for marker assisted breeding efforts, identity-preservation, and diversity assessment in this species or in closely related species such as proso millet. In this dataset we were able to locate a total of 334 potential microsatellite loci representing 3.8% of the total number of ESTs queried. This is similar to the rate of microsatellite discovery in wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, and barley ESTs. The relative frequency of di-, tri- and tetranucleotide repeats was also similar to that found in EST collections of other grasses.