  In this paper, we investigate the effect of noise and disorder on the
efficiency of excitation energy transfer (EET) in a $N=5$ sites linear chain
with "static" dipole-dipole couplings. In fact, here, the disordered chain is a
toy model for one strand of the selectivity filter backbone in ion channels. It
is recently discussed that the presence of quantum coherence in the selectivity
filter is possible and can play a role in mediating ion-conduction and
ion-selectivity in the selectivity filter. The question is "how a quantum
coherence can be effective in such structures while the environment of the
channel is dephasing (i.e. noisy)?" Basically, we expect that the presence of
the noise should have a destructive effect in the quantum transport. In fact,
we show that such expectation is valid for ordered chains. However, our results
indicate that introducing the dephasing in the disordered chains leads to the
weakening of the localization effects, arising from the randomness, and then
increases the efficiency of quantum energy transfer. Thus, the presence of
noise is crucial for the enhancement of EET efficiency in disordered chains. We
also show that the contribution of both classical and quantum mechanical
effects are required to improve the speed of energy transfer along the chain.
Our analysis may help for better understanding of fast and efficient
functioning of the selectivity filters in ion channels.
