In memoriam – Angelika A. Noegel

Angelika A. Noegel, a renowned cell biologist and role model for female scientists, sadly passed away on 19 January 2025. Angelika was born on 14 February 1952 in the beautiful town of Bamberg in Upper Franconia, Bavaria. She studied biology in Würzburg with a scholarship from the prestigious Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, and then moved to the lab of Prof. Dr Werner Goebel, receiving her PhD from the University of Würzburg in 1979. From 1979 to 1983, Angelika worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York, USA. From there, she went to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) in Martinsried near Munich, joining the Department of Cell Biology (under the directorship of Günther Gerisch), where she stayed until 1997 as a researcher and Principal Investigator. In 1997, Angelika was appointed as a full professor and Head of the Institute for Biochemistry I at the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne, where she stayed until her retirement in 2017.For more than 30 years, Angelika devoted most of her research to understanding the unicellular amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, making major contributions to the fields of the cytoskeleton, signal transduction and genomics research. As a model organism, D. discoideum offers unique advantages for studying fundamental cellular processes, host–pathogen interactions as well as the molecular causes of human diseases. In particular, research with D. discoideum has contributed significantly to the understanding of cell adhesion, cell motility, chemotaxis and cellular development (Müller-Taubenberger et al., 2013; Williams, 2010). The organism is also highly valuable for studying disease-related processes and elucidating the principles underlying pathological variations (Storey et al., 2022). During her time as a Principal Investigator at the MPIB, Angelika and her colleagues published several analyses of single mutants of evolutionarily highly conserved actin-interacting proteins (Andre et al., 1989; Brink et al., 1990; Noegel and Witke, 1988). Surprisingly, these mutants showed no detectable phenotype under laboratory conditions, leading to the hypothesis that actin-interacting proteins exhibit redundancy (Bray and Vasiliev, 1989). In the following years, the team around Angelika and her husband, Michael Schleicher, were able to use homologous recombination to generate double knock-out mutants of actin-interacting proteins that showed clear phenotypes, supporting the concept of functional redundancy in the microfilament system (Haugwitz et al., 1994; Noegel and Schleicher, 2000; Witke et al., 1992).Angelika was also a key player in the international consortium that sequenced the D. discoideum genome, and her contributions were instrumental for its successful completion (Eichinger and Noegel, 2003; Eichinger et al., 2005; Glöckner et al., 2002). The sequencing and assembly of the genome was a major challenge at that time due to the extreme compositional bias of D. discoideum DNA, which has an average AT content of nearly 78% (and up to 98% in intergenic regions), its relatively large chromosomes, and the presence of numerous highly conserved and large complex repetitive elements (Glöckner et al., 2001).Angelika was not only extremely dedicated to her work in D. discoideum; in her years at the University of Cologne, she very successfully extended her activities to research with Mus musculus, focusing on the composition and function of the protein complexes involved in connections between the nucleus and the cytoskeleton (Noegel and Neumann, 2011; Zhen et al., 2002). The complex is now known as the linker of nucleoskeleton and cytoskeleton (LINC) complex, which spans the nuclear envelope to couple the cytoplasmic cytoskeleton to the nuclear lamina and is crucial for the concept of mechanotransduction to the nucleus through a direct force transmission mechanism (King, 2023). In addition, together with Peter Nürnberg's group at the Cologne Center for Genomics, Angelika investigated the genetic basis of congenital microcephaly (Martin et al., 2014; Moawia et al., 2017). In this collaboration, new pathogenic variants of a number of genes underlying autosomal recessive primary microcephaly in consanguineous families from Pakistan were discovered, leading to a better molecular understanding of this hereditary disorder (Rasool et al., 2020).Moreover, Angelika was a very active and highly respected member of the scientific community. In 2000, she was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). In 2002–2005 and 2005–2006, she acted as vice president and president, respectively, of the German Society for Cell Biology (DGZ). Then, from 2007 until 2009, she was vice president of the Verband Biologie, Biowissenschaften und Biomedizin in Deutschland e.V. (VBIO). In addition to these roles, Angelika served as a reviewer for prominent funding organizations, such as the European Research Council (ERC), EMBO and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and as a member of the Journal of Cell Science Editorial Advisory Board. In her various science policy functions and as Head of the Institute for Biochemistry I, Angelika was always a strong advocate of basic research and for women in science. In her career, she supervised numerous bachelor’s and master’s students and around 100 PhD students, several of whom are now professors themselves in Germany, the USA and China. One of Angelika's former PhD students characterized her aptly in a letter of mourning to her husband: “Frau Noegel was a woman of few words, but she changed the lives of many people in a very meaningful way. Actions speak louder than words. She was not only a great mentor but also a very important part of my journey. She was humble, polite, elegant, warm and just a wonderful soul. She was kind and treated everyone with respect, no matter who we were and where we came from. I have very fond memories with her, and I am going to cherish them and will miss her deeply”.We have both known Angelika for nearly 40 years, and we have always admired her passion for research. Despite her many duties, she worked at the bench almost every day until her retirement. In her leisure time, Angelika loved to cook, and she was an enthusiastic visitor of operas, in particular those by Richard Wagner. It is worth mentioning that Angelika's love for music was not just passive – she actively played the piano herself. Furthermore, she enjoyed reading classical literature and going on city breaks; she was particularly fascinated by Rome.With Angelika's passing, we have lost an outstanding researcher, an excellent mentor of young scientists, and a dear friend and colleague. To conclude, we would like to share a short piece of text (similar to an old saw from Confucius) from her death notice, which in our opinion characterizes her very well: “I only ever saw her move forward. I never saw her stop when she had achieved something”.