Abstract: An outdoor pot experiment was conducted to compare maize(Zea mays) with soybean(Glycine max) in effect of removing petroleum pollutants from acid soil.Results show that both of the two plants are good at tolerating and removing petroleum pollutants in the soil.In labe,maize and soybean could remove 38.41%-64.30% and 34.24%-63.96%,respectively of the petroleum hydrocarbons in the soil,while in the field only 23.77%-58.43%.The PCR-DGGE pattern showed that abundance and diversity of the microbial community in the polluted soil decreased with the increase in concentration of the pollutants from 0 to 17 295 mg·kg^-1.The root systems of the two plants are able to selectively promote proliferation of some species of microbe in the rhizosphere and the effect is more significant with maize than with soybean.