Abstract: Acetone-butanol fermentation is one of the thriving industrial fermentation processes. Its decline since the 1950s was caused by the availability of much cheaper feed stocks for chemical solvent synthesis in the petrochemical industry. With the exhaustion of petrochemical resources，acetone-butanol fermentation displays great economic benefits and strategic significance. In this paper，the recent research progress in acetone-butanol fermentation is reviewed in detail，including metabolic mechanism，improvement of producing strains and development of fermentation process. High yield strategies are presented to resolve the existing problems in acetone-butanol fermentation，such as screening high butanol-tolerance strains，screening producing strains with high proportion of butanol，high efficiency utilization of solvent-producing cells and coupling fermentation with efficient separation process with low energy consumption.