deamination

There are costs to gluconeogenesis (glucose via protein catabolism), kidney issues to name one (deamination producing ammonia).

For example the deamination of cytosine to thymine can leave us with an ambiguity in what in our read for the correct nucleotide is.

Now, a primary amine is a relatively stable covalent bond, and getting selective deamination is going to be especially difficult since there's plenty of amines around.

At least on the ancient DNA projects I've worked on, the main obstacles have been a) deamination, b) fragmentation, and c) environmental contamination.

It's even formed directly by deamination of glutamate.

If this was the case, male bias might be expected to correlate with factors associated with postmortem DNA preservation, such as sample age, average DNA fragment length, and cytosine deamination rate.

The BER pathway is responsible for repairing most endogenous small DNA damage, including deamination, depurination, alkylation, and oxidative damage, which occurs approximately 30,000 times per cell per day.

While I don't think it's meaningful to say that one chain is more legitimate than another, if I was forced to make such a deamination in this case, I would consider the chain where the rules are consistently and predictably enforced in a way that leads to predictable outcomes more legitimate than a chain where validators have colluded to arbitrarily subvert the enforcement of the rules.