Microbial strain screening can greatly help understand the roles of Earth's microbiome, and thus has the high scientific merit, as well as the associated ecological and social economic benefits. Although the traditional methods are feasible, their processes for screening strains are tedious and time consuming. Alternatively, the modern screening techniques recently have become a hot spot in worldwide due to the features of convenience and high throughput etc. In this paper, current domestic and international research advances on microbial strain screening, such as laser tweezers and Raman spectroscopy, flow cytometry, laser-induced forward transfer and in situ cultivation were briefly introduced, by comparing their advantages and disadvantages against those of traditional methods. Then the prospects of these techniques and methods in future were forecasted.