How do you store scientific notation numbers in MySQL

Question

I want to store scientific notation numbers in MySql.

I've saved them to a field which has datatype decimal. The issue is that it stores it in normal notation (at least that what it seems when I view the number in the web console that comes with MAMP) and thus you need to allocate more bytes to the field ... which I believe will lead to having a very large database.

Is there anyway to store the scientific notation as is (far fewer units of information), but still be able to do numeric computations e.g. < and > (context for the last comment is that if you just needed to display the value you could store it as a text type, but that won't do for me).