## 1 Introduction
One study used species of wild plants for the rhizreediation of soil contaminated with aliphatic hydrocarbon [35]. This study showed that wild plants are good agents for the rhizreediation of aliphatic hydrocarbon-contaminated soil. Some studies have shown how enhanced landfarming can be used to bioremediate soil polluted by lubricants and diesel [16]. The biopile technique has also been used for the remediation of oil-contaminated soils [26; 36]. Similarly, a strain of _Pseudomonas aeruginosa_ recovered from forest soil was reported to be a good agent for the biodegradation of diesel [27]. Generally, cultural techniques and 16S rRNA can be used for the isolation and identification of potential hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria from soil samples [2]. Such bacteria can then be used for the bioremediation of petroleum-polluted sites [37]. The adoption of omics techniques has helped in the identification of potentially useful microbes for the decontamination of oil polluted environments. Metagenomic analysis of a hydrocarbon-degrading bacterial consortium showed that the bacterial consortium was able to ensure the biodegradation of hydrocarbon by 70%, indicating the potential of the consortium for environmental remediation [15]. This implies that metagenomics evaluation can lead to the identification of microorganisms in hydrocarbon-contaminated soil that can be used as a consortium for bioremediation purposes. Some metagenomic diversity studies based on the sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene have identified diverse bacteria that could be involved in the degradation of hydrocarbon. For instance, [PERSON] et al. (2019) identified strains such as _Pseudomonas_, _Aquobacterium_, _Chrysobacterium_, and _Splingomonadaceae_ as the dominant genera in a 16S-rRNA based metagenomic analysis of a diesel oil-polluted-soil in a rhizeremediation assay [34]. The advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques has influenced many studies, revealing the efficiency of using NGS for the quantification, identification, and analysis of the microbial population in soil [30; 38; 39]. Next-generation sequencing-based techniques have been employed in bio-stimulation assays to determine the most dominant bacterial phyla in contaminated soil using Illumina sequencing technology. The outcome of this study identified proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Bacteroidetes phyla as the most abundant species in the studied soil [40]. In another study using the 16S rRNA gene-based Illumina MiSeq sequencing, proteobacteria (49.11%) and actinobacteria (24.24%) were reported as the most dominant phyla, and the main genera were Pseudoxanthomonas, Luteimonas, Alkanindiges, Acinetobacter and agromyces in oil-contaminated soil [28]. Previous analyses of soil using next-generation sequencing techniques have shown that next-generation sequencing is an important tool in understanding the diversity and functional roles of microbes in their environment [41; 42; 43]. We believe a next-generation-based analysis of crude oil-contaminated soil from Tabasco and Tamaulipas can reveal the diversity and functional role of the microbes in these environments. There is still a paucity of information on the abundance of the microbial population of the oil-contaminated soils of Mexico. We conducted a study to characterize the structure and diversity of bacterial communities in contaminated soil samples collected from the Tamaulipas and Tabasco regions in Mexico.