Background:
In synthetic biology, and also in nature, there are lots of examples of genes in both the forward and reverse orientation. It seems in synthetic biology/bioengineering, most genetic devices are, by default, encoded on the forward strand unless there are concerns of readthrough from one expression unit to another, in which case one of the expression units is included on the reverse strand like below:
It also seems that genes are sometimes in the reverse orientation for no apparent reason, especially in plasmid backbones:
The Question:
My question is, ignoring issues of potential readthrough, does it matter which strand a genetic device is encoded on? So in the example below, would there be any difference between A and B, or does it not matter? Also, does whether it's on a plasmid compared to a genome matter? I'm specifically interested in bacteria here.
This seems like it should be a simple question to answer and I'm sure I'm just missing something, but I can't find anything about it.