A Rice University team unveiled CLASSIC, a platform that combines long‑ and short‑read sequencing with AI/ML design to generate and map hundreds of thousands to millions of genetic circuit variants, accelerating synthetic biology design. Published in Nature, the study demonstrated library construction, barcode tagging, and pooled functional screening in human cells to correlate sequence with circuit output. CLASSIC uses dual sequencing modalities to balance long‑range context and short‑read accuracy, enabling high‑throughput evaluation of complex multi‑kilobase DNA designs. The authors report that pairing this experimental scale with machine learning shortens the time to find functional gene‑circuit architectures, potentially streamlining synthetic biology workflows.