As a recalcitrant pollutant, quinoline has been shown a growing concern on its negative effect following the rapid development of the related industries. Thus the treatment of this pollutant is being paid more attention. Since the end of 20th century, scientists have done serials of studies on the microbial degradation of quinoline. Dozens of bacterial and fungal strains were isolated. The studies of degrading capacity and applications of these strains were performed then. However, the study on the anaerobic degradation of quinoline is relatively lagged behind. Here in this paper, we review the researches done by domestic scientists and draw a perspective of the future studies.