and, in essence, is an acid-catalyzed autohydrolysis of lignocellulosic materials. Because acidity increases with increasing temperature during the microwave pretreatment, high temperature becomes essential. Microwave irradiation could easily be combined with chemical reaction to accelerate the chemical reaction rate. The combination of microwave treatment with either acid or alkali or combined acid/alkali may be an alternative pretreatment of lignocellulosic materials (Binod et al., 2012). In the MW treatment studied, the trials were not assisted with any acid or alkali treatment, although the literature reports several examples of this procedure (Sheetal et al., 2013) in which combined MW-alkali or acid treatment yielded a higher hydrolysis rate and enhanced the reducing sugar yield (Pooja and Padmaja, 2015). In this study, additional acid or alkali treatments that might negate the need for a subsequent neutralization treatment were omitted to avoid substrate modification (Feng and Chen, 2008).