**1. Introduction**

268 Sustainable Growth and Applications in Renewable Energy Sources

Zhang, Y.; Dube, M.A.; Mclean, D.D. & Katis. M: E. (2003). Biodiesel production from waste

Bioresources technology, vol 90, pp 229-240, ISSN 0960-8524.

cooking oil: 2 Economic assessment and sensitivity analyses. Journal of

By 2020, proportion of renewable energy sources should be around 20 per cent of the total energy consumption in the European Union, according to the new treaty signed by European leaders in 2009. This vast amount of renewable energy can be sourced from hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar power and, of course, from biofuels. To achieve this ambitious target, new technologies must be invented to exploit energy from the abiotic source of renewables and new energy plant species should be developed and produced, serving as source for solid, liquid biofuels and for biogas production. The most intensively studied and used bioenergy crops include miscanthus, reed canary grass, willows and poplars. We already have considerable knowledge about these energy plants from their taxonomical relations to their detailed crop technologies. In this chapter, we introduce a novel energy plant that has been cultivated for more than a century in many parts of the world for numerous purposes (e.g. land remediation, erosion control, forage), but its potential for energy production has not yet been realized. Tall wheatgrass, a new energy crop (*Elymus elongatus* subsp. *ponticus* cv. Szarvasi-1) has recently been introduced to cultivation in Hungary to provide biomass for solid biofuel energy production. The cultivar was developed in Hungary. The main goal of our research was to investigate the performance of Szarvasi-1 energy grass under different growing conditions (e.g. soil types, nutrition supply). We focused on the ecological background, biomass yield, weed composition, morphology, ecophysiology and the genetics of the plant.

<sup>\*</sup> Szilvia Stranczinger1, Bálint Szalontai1, Ágnes Farkas1, Róbert W. Pál1, Éva Salamon-Albert1,

Marianna Kocsis1, Péter Tóvári3, Tibor Vojtela3, József Dezső1, Ilona Walcz1,

Zsolt Janowszky2, János Janowszky2 and Attila Borhidi1

*<sup>1</sup>University of Pécs, Hungary* 

*<sup>2</sup>Hungaro-Grass Kft, Hungary* 

*<sup>3</sup>Hungarian Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Hungary* 

Tall Wheatgrass Cultivar Szarvasi–1 (*Elymus elongatus* subsp. *ponticus* cv. Szarvasi–1)

**Genus Species Synonyms** 

*repens* (L.) Gould

Table 1. Hungarian *Agropyron* and *Elymus* taxa used in the interspecies study

*ponticus* cv. Szarvasi-1, *E. hispidus*, and *A. cristatum* - were newly determined.

The phylogenetic relationships inferred from molecular data of both the *rpo*A gene and ITS regions supported the separation of the studied *Elymus* taxa from *A. cristatum –* formerly

the studied taxa.

*Elymus* L. (*Roegneria* Koch, *Elytrigia* Desv., *Clinelymus* (Griseb.)

Nevski)

as a Potential Energy Crop for Semi-Arid Lands of Eastern Europe 271

primers were retained, due to their ability to produce polymorphic, unambiguous and stable RAPD markers. Various banding patterns were revealed by different primers, but only polymorphic fragments of high intensity and moderate size (between 100 and 3000 bp) were used. About 98% (131 bands) of the total number of bands (136) were polymorphic. Though the high number of polymorphic bands allows the easy differentiation of analyzed samples using RAPD markers, it gives poor information regarding the relationships among

*Agropyron* Gaertner *cristatum* (L.) Gaertner *Eremopyrum cristatum* (L.) Willk.

*elongatus* (Host)Runemark *Triticum elongatum* Host

*hispidus* (Opiz) Melderis *Agropyron hispidum* Opiz

Sequence analysis was performed for two DNA regions: the *rpo*A gene of the plastid genome including partial sequences of *pet*D and *rps*11 genes, which was successfully applied by Gitta Petersen and Ole Seberg (1997) to study the Triticeae tribe; and the intergenic spacers (ITS) of the rDNA, an extensively used marker in molecular phylogeny. These analyses resolved the exact taxonomic position of Szarvasi-1. Plant materials were collected from field and identified carefully using morphological characters. Total DNA was extracted from leaves, the targeted DNA loci were amplified in polymerase chain reactions (PCR) and sequenced. New DNA sequence data were deposited to GenBank. Cladistic analyses were performed with PAUP\* 4.0 software (Swofford, 2001) on Windows XP, using maximum parsimony, supplemented with additional public sequence data referring to the tribe. *Bromus inermis* was used as an outgroup. The analysis comprised 32 sequences representing 21 of the 24 monogenomic genera of the Triticeae. In the case of the *rpo*A data, the final matrix contained 1385 characters, of which 1276 (92%) were constant, 84 (6%) variable but uninformative and 25 (1.8%) informative. The analysis resulted in a 129-step-long parsimonious tree (Fig. 1.A) (consistency index including all characters = 0.9225, consistency index excluding uninformative characters = 0.7368, retention index = 0.9048). However, the results were based on only a small number of phylogenetically informative characters (1.8%) – concentrated mostly in the non-coding spacer regions. Therefore the study was completed by the analysis based on the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacers (ITS) (Fig. 1.B). In the latter case the final matrix included 596 characters: 459 (77%) were constant, 53 (8.9%) variable but uninformative and 83 (13.4%) informative (tree length = 214 steps long, consistency index including all characters = 0.7617, consistency index excluding uninformative characters = 0.6731, retention index = 0.7475). In both cases, four sequences – *E. elongatus*, *E. elongatus* subsp.

*Agropyron elongatum* (Host) Beauv.

*Agropyron intermedium* (Host) Beauv.

*Agropyron repens* (L.) Beauv *Elytrigia repens* (L.) Nevski

*Triticum repens* L.
