Researchers published PanMAN (Pangenome Mutation-Annotated Network), a data structure and compression method that encodes phylogeny, mutations and whole-genome alignments to dramatically reduce storage needs for large pangenome datasets. The method, described in Nature Genetics, stores a base sequence at the root of a phylogenetic tree and annotates variation against that reference to compress redundancy. PanMAN was validated on SARS‑CoV‑2 and other large collections, showing orders-of-magnitude storage savings versus traditional formats while preserving biological information such as mutation histories and phylogenies. Authors said the approach addresses reference bias by supporting population-level references and enables efficient updates as new genomes are added. The compression advance promises to lower infrastructure costs for large-scale sequencing consortia and to broaden access to pangenomic analyses across groups lacking massive storage resources.