With the constant rise of energy price, it has a great practical meaning of using lignocellulose to produce ethanol. Xylose is a kind of monosaccharide whose content is only less than glucose in most lignocellulosic hydrolysates. There is some difficulty of producing ethanol from lignocellulose by the traditional ethanol production strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae, because it cannot metabolize xylose. People have tried to use genetic engineering technology and cell fusion method to modify Saccharomyces cerevisiae to make it metabolize xylose and produce ethanol for many years. This review indroduced the progress in this field.