An ionic liquids-based chemical hydrolysis strategy was developed to obtain high-yielding soluble sugars from Chlorella biomass. Initial ionic liquids dissolution and subsequently HCl catalyzed hydrolysis could dissolve 75.34% of Chlorella biomass and release 88.02% of total sugars from Chlorella biomass. The amount of HCl loading was 7 wt.% relative to Chlorella biomass weight, which was much lower (only 14.6%) than that in HCl/MgCl2-catalyzed system with similar sugars release (Zhou et al., 2011). Ionic liquids in the hydrolysates were recycled and fermentable sugars were evaluated by converting to bioethanol after separated by ion-exclusion chromatography. This ionic liquids-based hydrolysis strategy showed the great potential to produce fermentable sugars from algal biomass. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.