Researchers applied genome-graph methods to Mycobacterium tuberculosis and uncovered large structural variants that traditional reference-based analyses miss. The Nature Communications paper shows structural rearrangements and mobile elements contribute to adaptive evolution in M. tuberculosis, with implications for transmission, drug resistance, and vaccine design. The team demonstrated that genome graphs improve detection of insertions, deletions, and complex rearrangements across diverse Mtb lineages and linked specific structural features to phenotypes relevant for pathogenesis. These findings change how bacterial genomics can inform surveillance and evolutionary inference. For diagnostics and public-health genomics, adopting graph-based pipelines could improve variant calling and the detection of clinically important genomic changes that influence resistance and virulence.