Ishige okamurae, with leathery branched narrow fronds consisting of cylindrical hairs, is the typical species of the genus Ishige, which is considered as one of the most basal genera in the phylogeny of the Phaeophy-ceae. Apart from great public interest from the evolutionary respect, more attention has been brought on the abundant bioactive compounds in I. okamurae for therapeutic or economic considerations, such as di-phlorethohydroxycarmalol and ishigoside. Yet little is known about related key genes or metabolic pathways involved in I. okamurae, which calls upon us to carry out global analyses of transcriptome by next generation sequencing. Altogether, we obtained 78 583 assembled scaffolds with N50 of 1 709 nucleotides, and 25 357 unigenes with significant BLAST matches (E-value cutoff of 10-5). In terms of characterization of the tran-scriptome of I. okamurae, we focused on anti-stress metabolic pathways and synthetic routes of bioactive compounds in an attempt to obtain a better understanding of the interactive organism-environment regula-tory networks. Pathway-based analysis helped us to deepen our comprehension of the interaction between I. okamurae and its surroundings, with MAPK signal pathway as an example. Furthermore, we discovered a wide range of novel putative functional proteins that could be of wide application, such as Rab family, using sequence-based transcriptome. In conclusion, transcriptome characterization of I. okamurae (Phaeophy-ceae) shows strong environmental acclimation.