## 1 Introduction  
Infectious diseases can be disseminated widely in various ways. They are mainly caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, or parasites. Despite great achievements in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, infectious diseases remain a serious global health threat [1; 2]. The challenges of controlling infectious diseases include irrational use of antibiotics, an increase of multidrug-resistant pathogens, the emergence of new pathogenic microorganisms, and rapid spread owing to globalization and overpopulation [3]. Timely diagnosis and targeted antimicrobial treatment are important for the successful clinical control of infectious diseases. Current diagnostic methods for infectious diseases mainly rely on laboratory-based tests including culture, microscopy, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [4]. These methods are time-consuming, expensive, and required to be operated by a specialist. Biosensors are ideal alternative methods for timely diagnosis of infectious diseases. They have many merits such as high sensitivity, quick read-out time, and are easier to be mass fabricated and miniaturized. They also can be used as point-of-care (POC) devices at a doctor's office or home because of their simplicity and affordability. Therefore, extensive research has been published to report ultrasensitive electrochemical biosensors for infectious disease detection with excellent performance. Receptors and transducer are the two main components of biosensors. The receptor recognizes the analyte specifically and the transducer converts the binding activity into a measurable signal sensitivity. Electrodes are used as a transducer in electrochemical biosensors [5]. Natural receptors (Figure 1) such as antibodies, DNA, aptamer, phage, lectin, and peptide are used as receptors. They have a high affinity to their targets, but there are also huge challenges in practical applications because of their poor durability and repeatability at high temperature, pressure, in organic solvents, and also low stability in low or high pH solutions. Alternatively, the molecular imprinting technique has been reported to overcome most of these drawbacks. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) [6] and surface imprinted polymers (SIPs) [7,8] have a great potential to be robust artificial receptors (also called plastic antibodies) [9]. Due to its chemical and physical stability, MIPs/SIPs have provided a new insight for creating receptors by forming specific cavities for binding analytes in the polymeric matrix. In contrast to natural receptors, MIPs/SIPs offer an inexpensive, rapid, sensitive, easy-to-use, and highly selective receptors for sensors, typically for the electrochemical biosensors. Hence, MIPs/SIPs based electrochemical biosensors have become very attractive for infectious diseases. Several related reviews have been reported. [PERSON] et al. [10] mainly presented the development of MIPs modified with nanomaterials for electrochemical biosensors. Good electrical catalytic properties and excellent conductivity of nanomaterials combined with the comparable selectivity of MIPs endow them with powerful performance for various kinds of biomarkers. The magnetic nanoparticles, carbon dots, multi/single-walled carbon nanotubes, and graphene oxides modified MIPs for electrochemical sensing were highlighted in their review paper. Origins, preparation methods, and applications of SIPs applied in larger biomarkers were reviewed by [PERSON] and coworkers [11]. They pointed out that the measurement of larger biomarkers such as viruses, bacteria, or cells met challenges when using the classical MIPs concept. SIPs can form binding cavities directly on the surface of cured polymers, thus making it easier to remove the templates and provide better use in larger biomarkers (Figure 1).