Isolation and incubation as a means to study soil microbial communities has severe limitations, since the majority of microbes in the soil are unculturable. With the development of the molecular biology, a series of techniques which are independent of culturing are being widely used in the research of soil microbial communities. In this paper, techniques, such as Biomarker, SCSU, DNA renaturation experiment, DGGE, TGGE, ARDRA, T-RFLP, SSCP, PAPD and ERIC-PCR, commonly used in this field were introduced.