Clostridium saccharoperbutylacetonicum N1-4 has great potentials for acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) production from lignocellulosic carbon sources. However, fundamental information about its metabolism of lignocellulosic sugars and tolerance to fermentation inhibitors is not available. Here, we systematically evaluated effects of representative sugars and lignocellulosic inhibitors on ABE fermentation by C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum. Results indicated that C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum can use glucose, cellobiose, xylose, arabinose and mannose efficiently, while degrade galactose slowly and incompletely. Glucose was the most preferable carbon source that has shown carbon catabolite repression (CCR) on the degradation of other sugars. However, the actual sugar preference is highly dependent on the composition (including sugar types and concentrations). Ferulic acid, syringaldehyde and rho-coumaric acid are potent phenolic inhibitors, with rho-coumaric acid as the most toxic. C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum can tolerate up to 0.8, 0.8 and 0.4 g/L of ferulic acid, syringaldehyde and rho-coumaric acid, respectively. Furfural and hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) are inhibitory but not as toxic as phenolic inhibitors. C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum can tolerate up to 3 g/L furfural or HMF individually or as a mixture (1.5 g/L for each). Both furfural and HMF can be completely converted into their corresponding alcohols, with furfural is more rapidly transformed than HMF. Comparing to other prominent solventogenic clostridia, C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum can tolerate higher or at least comparable levels of inhibitors; it can adapt to inhibition conditions and produce more ABE than the control. Therefore, our results testified that C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum is a robust workhorse for biofuel production. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.