Abstract:Reducing sugar yield and ethanol concentration was used as the indexes to probe the effect of detoxification on enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol fermentation by using different organic solvents to extract the inhibitors from the catalyst free steam exploded corn straw as detoxification method. The reducing sugar yield varied from 34.8 to 89.7% depending on the detoxification solvents and modes. The results showed that both reducing sugar yield and ethanol concentration showed highly negative correlation to the boiling points of the organic solvents, which indicate that the solvent residue is the main reason of enzyme inactivation. However, the ethanol yield varied from 0.47 to 0.49g ethanol / g reducing sugar for the studied extractive organic solvents,,which shows that solvent residue had no significant effect on the ethanol fermentation. The highest ethanol yield (96.1% of theoretical value) was obtained with the combined extraction of ether and acetone.