Comment on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts

I guess I'll bite - what am I looking at here?

An (agarose?) gel.

There are partial holes in at at one end. You insert a small amount of dyed DNA (etc) containing solution each. Apply an electrical potential across the gel. DNA gradually moves along. Smaller DNA fragments move faster. So, at a given time, you can coarsely measure fragment size of a given sample. Your absolute scale is given by "standards", aka "ladders" that have samples of multiple, known sizes.

The paper authors cheated (allegedly) by copy + pasting images of the gel. This is what was caught, so it implies they may have made up some or all results in this and other papers.

Close - this is a SDS-PAGE gel, and you run it using proteins. The bands in the first two rows are from a western blot (gel is transferred to a membrane), where you use antibodies against those specific proteins to detect them. The Pon S row is Ponceau S, a dye that non-specifically detects all proteins - so it's used as a loading control, to make sure that the same amount of total protein is loaded in each lane of the gel.

Is it conceivable that the control was run once because the key result came from the same run? I can see a reviewer asking for it in all three figures, whereas they may drafted it only in one