Rolf Nidergerke (30 April 1921 – 27 December 2011) was a German physiologist and physician, and one of the discoverers of the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction.
He could manage to continue at Charles University in Prague in Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic) and received his medical degree (MD) in 1945, just as the war ended.
In 1947 he got an opportunity to join Prof Hermann Rein at the Physiological Institute, Göttingen, to study the electrical activity of nerve fibres.
[2] He made four important publications in German on frog nervous system (myelinated neurons) during his research training.
Niedergerke moved to England in the autumn of 1952 as a George Henry Lewes Student with additional support from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
[9][10] Their conclusion states that the observation: "… makes very attractive the hypothesis that during contraction the actin filaments are drawn into the A-bands, between the rodlets of myosin.
… If a relative force between actin and myosin is generated at each of a series of points in the region of overlap in such sarcomeres, then tension per filament should be proportional to the number in this zone of overlap".This was the discovery of "Sliding Filament Theory", the first scientific evidence and the basis of modern understanding of muscle contraction.