Discovery of non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNP), which cause amino acid substitutions, is important because they are more likely to alter protein function than synonymous SNPs (sSNP) or those SNPs that do not result in amino acid changes. By changing the coding sequences, nsSNP may play a role in heritable differences between individual organisms. In the chicken and many other vertebrates, the main obstacle for identifying nsSNP is that there is insufficient protein and mRNA sequence information for self-species referencing and thus, determination of the correct reading frame for expressed sequence tags (ESTs) is difficult. Therefore, in order to estimate the correct reading frame at nsSNP in chicken ESTs, a double-screening approach was designed using self- or cross-species protein referencing, in addition to the ESTScan coding region estimation programme. Starting with 23 427 chicken ESTs, 1210 potential SNPs were discovered using a phred/phrap/polyphred/consed pipeline process and among these, 108 candidate nsSNP were identified with the double screening method. A searchable SNP database (chicksnps) for the candidate chicken SNPs, including both nsSNPs and sSNPs is available at http://chicksnps.afs.udel.edu. The chicken SNP data described in this paper have been submitted to the data base SNP under National Center for Biotechnology Information assay ID ss4387050-ss4388259.