CMAC: A deep learning framework for absolute cardiomyocyte transcriptional age estimation

Cardiomyocyte maturation spans embryogenesis through postnatal life and involves coordinated transcriptional transitions that are disrupted in disease and incompletely recapitulated by stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes. However, no unified framework exists for assigning absolute transcriptional maturation age across datasets, platforms, and experimental conditions. Here, we developed CMAC (Cardiomyocyte Maturation Age Clock), integrating 18 murine single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets spanning embryonic and postnatal timepoints, into a batch-invariant probabilistic atlas using single cell variational inference (scVI) with a 100-dimensional latent representation. Analysis of the developmental trajectory revealed highly non-uniform transcriptional change, with 63.9% of the total transcriptional journey completed by birth and the neonatal transition representing the largest single transcriptional step. An XGBoost regressor trained on the CMAC latent space predicted absolute chronological age with a leave-one-dataset-out mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.09 days (median 3.27 days), Pearson r = 0.903, and Spearman ρ = 0.908 across 18 datasets and six sequencing platforms, outperforming linear regression (MAE = 6.18 days) and PCA-based representations (MAE = 6.35 days). In an independent P14 cohort comprising 98,163 cardiomyocytes from six biological replicates, CMAC achieved a mouse-level MAE of 0.33 days, with all six mice predicted within 1.1 days of chronological age. Application of CMAC to a previously published PGC1α/β double-knockout model with established delayed cardiomyocyte maturation independently recapitulated this phenotype, quantifying maturation deficits of 4.77 to 8.60 days across P7 to P28, with the largest deficit at P14. Together, these results establish CMAC as a quantitative, deep learning framework for assigning absolute transcriptional maturation age and quantifying deviations from normal cardiomyocyte development.