He was a good choice because his personal interest had been on skeletal muscle and had a good collection on the subject since his time in Göttingen. He worked using Huxley's own interference microscope. Within a year he helped to improve the technique and a research paper on the mechanism of muscle contraction was ready. At that moment almost the same observation was made by Hugh Huxley and Jean Hanson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Authored in pairs their papers were simultaneously published in the 22 May 1954 issue of "Nature". Their conclusion states that the observation:  This was the discovery of "Sliding Filament Theory", the first scientific evidence and the basis of modern understanding of muscle contraction. Contrary to scientific view of the time they found that the muscle as a whole do not contract of expand, but it was individual group of the muscle fibres (called I or light bands), while other fibres (A or dark bands) are never changed. The very "hypothesis" was experimentally proved in 1966. Niedergerke moved from Cambridge to London in 1955, joining the Biophysics Department at University College London. Taking the suggestion of Bernard Katz, he continued his study on cardiac muscle (a specialised muscle of the heart), on which he discovered the role of calcium in muscle contraction (often dubbed the "calcium story") He retired from UCL in 1987. Nidergerke suffered from poor health after his retirement. He gradually lost vision and hearing. His condition was exacerbated by pneumonia, and he died on 27 December 2011 at the Royal Free Hospital in London.