system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Trek] Can the teleporter be used to reconfigure the object being teleported? What are the limits?

The food replicator in Star Trek is a sort of teleporter, and it has recipes on how to assemble the source material to fill an order. Therefore Star Trek teleporters can manipulate data used during the teleportation process. So what are the limits?

Can I use the teleporter to perform surgery and remove a tumor? Can I use it to genetically combine two animals into a chimera? Can I use it to perform plastic surgery and give someone a face lift? Can I use it as a weapon during a war and teleport enemy soldiers, but reconfigure them into blocks of carbon?

I'm not very familiar with the Star Trek universe, so examples in-universe are appreciated.
gpt
Allegedly, replicators are “molecular resolution,” while the personnel transporters are “quantum resolution.” The former are sufficient for rearranging feedstock into food and equipment or whatever, but the latter is necessary for living beings. Quantum resolution is so detailed that it’s not feasible to store the pattern for a complete person; they’re broken down and transmitted via a “pattern buffer” bit by bit. The idea is that you’re scanned, you’re beamed, and the pattern is never stored.

However. The transporter also supposedly reads the pattern and filters out known contagions and (I think at least sometimes?) weapons. It seems like it would be conceivable to swap a body part or something, but maybe there are limits to inserting a new pattern with precision in the brief time it flits through the buffer. It’s not normally used for surgery.

Transporter accidents have certainly done stuff like accidentally merge two characters or duplicate characters or even cross the boundary between universes.