Karenia brevis has unusually stable mRNA and, like other dinoflagellates, appears to regulate gene expression primarily at the post-transcriptional level. To better understand the relative roles of transcription and translation in stress responses, we compared the K. brevis transcriptome and the “translatome”, the pool of actively translated massages associated with polysomes, under control, exponential growth conditions and under short term heat shock conditions (30 and 60 minutes) that were sufficient to significantly inhibit global translation. Our interest was to determine if K. brevis has a classic stress response consisting of the transcriptional activation of stress response genes and/or recruitment of stress response genes to the translational machinery.