To gain genetic information of oil-producing algae Botryococcus braunii, a novel dataset of 185,936 complementary DNA (cDNA) reads was obtained via pyrosequencing for the representative race A strain (strain BOT-88-2) exhibiting high oil productivity. The cDNA reads were assembled to retrieve 29,038 non-redundant sequences and 964 of them were successfully annotated based on similarity to database sequences. The transcriptome data embraced candidate genes for majority of enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of unsaturated very long-chain fatty acids. The transcriptome dataset has been deposited in the GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ database. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.