Does direction relative to origin of replication matter on small plasmids?
I like this question, and I had a similar thought when reading that &quot;Forward or Reverse Strand&quot; post. I've since found a 2005 publication by Mirkin and Mirkin1, which investigates the interaction between the replication fork and transcription machinery in context of an E. coli plasmid.
An excerpt from the abstract:

Studying Escherichia coli plasmids, which carry constitutive or inducible promoters in different orientations relative to the replication origin, we show that the mutual orientation of the two processes determines their mode of interaction. Replication elongation appears not to be affected by transcription proceeding in the codirectional orientation. Head-on transcription, by contrast, leads to severe inhibition of the replication fork progression.

To break this down, replication in E. coli proceeds at approximately 20 times the rate of transcription.2,3 From this, there are two kinds of collisions possible: (1) a &quot;head-on&quot; collision where replication and transcription complexes proceeding in different directions meet, or (2) a &quot;co-directional&quot; collision where the faster replication complex catches up to the slower transcription complex proceeding in the same direction.  Mirkin and Mirkin find that co-directional collisions have little effect on the procession of the DNA polymerase III holoenzyme, whereas head-on collisions
cause replication to stall.

One can clearly see that when transcription from the P7 promoter is codirectional with replication, replication was not affected (Fig.3A). Head-on transcription, in contrast, imposed severe constraints on the replication fork progression (Fig.3B).

Altogether, it is a gem of a paper, and I suggest reading the full discussion to best understand the limitations of their experiments and their caveats in interpreting the results. (e.g. the different rates of procession of DNA Pol I and III, and the frequency of polymerase switching.)

References

Mirkin EV, Mirkin SM. Mechanisms of transcription-replication collisions in bacteria. Mol Cell Biol. 2005 Feb;25(3):888-95.
Gotta SL, Miller OL Jr, French SL. rRNA transcription rate in Escherichia coli. J Bacteriol. 1991 Oct;173(20):6647-9.
Hirose S, Hiraga S, Okazaki T. Initiation site of deoxyribonucleotide polymerization at the replication origin of the Escherichia coli chromosome. Mol Gen Genet. 1983;189(3):422-31.