Gas chromatography was used to monitor the reductive dechlorination of trichloroethylene (TCE) by anaerobic enrichment cultures with benzoate as the sole carbon source. The 454 pyrosequencing technique was used to investigate the microbial community and the real-time quantitative PCR was used to quantify the gene copies of Dehalococcoides spp. (DHC). The results showed that TCE was dechlorinated to vinyl chloride along with the formation of methane in 94 days. The anaerobic enrichment cultures exhibited a high diversity, which were classified into 16 phyla, 33 classes, 52 orders, 88 families and 129 genera, while 51.2% of them belonged to unclassified group, which inferred that there were a large portion of bacteria with unknown functional in this system. Degradation of TCE was accomplished by reductive dechlorinating and other functional populations, and the DHC which carried tceA gene could be the dominant reductive dechlorinating populations in the system.