Soil is a complex redox system where many active biogeochemical processes co-occurred, such as denitrification, iron/sulfate reduction, methanogenesis and reductive dehalogenation, etc. Due to their frequent and close interaction, these typical redox processes make a great contribution in regulating the transformation/transportation of elements and pollutants in a natural soil ecosystem. Recently, with the development of molecular biology technology, studies regarding the microbial community structure, distribution characteristics and relative abundance in soil environment, based on functional gene biomarkers, become a hot topic around the world. The key genes encoding for specific functional enzymes in typical redox processes have been continually improved. This greatly advanced our understanding with respect to the specific metabolic pathway of elements and pollutants in soils, and promoted the in-depth development in studies on environmental microbial ecology. However, due to the diversity of microorganisms and functional genes, the influence of different environmental factors, and their extensive interactions in the natural soil environment, our knowledge currently available for demonstrating the complicated metabolic pathways and the coupling mechanism among different elements and pollutants are still finite. Therefore, the key functional genes and their diversity involved in several major reduction processes in soils were reviewed in this paper. Through comprehensive analysis of the microbial community structure and functional properties during the reduction processes of NO₃^－, Fe(Ⅲ) and SO₄^2－, the process of methanogenesis, and the reductive dehalogenation of halogenated organic pollutants, we aim to explore the coupling mechanism between typical soil redox processes and the reductive removal of halogenated organic pollutants, thereby developing an improved strategy for pollution remediation.