Soil salinization severely constrains the growth of crops, which ultimately leads to reduced yields. Because Sorghum dochna (common name sugar sorghum) has the advantageous properties of excellent salt stress resis- tance, high biomass, and tremendous flexibility for utilization as food, livestock feed, and industrial products, this species holds great potential to be further developed as a primary alternative crop. To elucidate the molecular mechanism that governs sugar sorghum’s adaptation to high salinity environments, we constructed a suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) cDNA library from sugar sorghum transcripts that contains the soda saline-alkali induced up-regulated genes from the resistant variety M-81E. The SSH cDNA library was screened by using the colony hybridization method, and the ESTs obtained were sequenced and analyzed. A total of 200 EST clones were identified, representing 127 unigenes (6 contigs and 121 singlets). A Blast analysis showed that 48 ESTs (46.6%) have annotated functions in GenBank, 55 ESTs (53.4%) have unknown functions (or encode hypothetical proteins), and 24 ESTs (18.9%) have no blast hits. The majority of the hypothetical ESTs from the cDNA library displayed very high sequence similarity with their homologs found through GenBank. A clustering analysis of the ESTs with known functions indicated that a wide variety of genes were induced during the salt stress treatment. These genes were found to function in photosynthesis, material and energy metabolism (carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, co-enzymes, ions, etc.), synthesis or maintenance of constituents of the cell wall and cell membrane, signal transduction, transcriptional regulation, and as water channels. This indicates that sugar sorghum tolerance to soda saline-alkali stress results from the coordinated functions of many genes