Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) has recently emerged as a promising preclinical imaging modality.Iterative methods based on sparse regularization play a critical role in solving the ill-posed BLT inverse problem.Four kinds of typical iterative methods based on l1 regularization were briefly introduced and applied to reconstruct the bioluminescent source location and intensity,which include interior-point methods,homotopy methods,firstorder methods,and augmented Lagrangian methods.Numerical experiments on a digital inhomogeneous mouse model and in vivo experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of these methods in terms of localization accuracy,reconstructed intensity and power.