Remove item from list based on the next item in same list

Question

I just started learning python and here I have a sorted list of protein sequences (total 59,000 sequences) and some of them overlap. I have made a toy list here for example:

Answer 1

# assuming list is sorted:
pattern = ["ABCDE",
"ABCDEFG",
"ABCDEFGH",
"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO",
"CEST",
"DBTSFDE",
"DBTSFDEO",
"EOEUDNBNUW",
"EAEUDNBNUW",
"FG",
"FGH"]

pattern = list(reversed(pattern))

def iterate_patterns():
    while pattern:
        i = pattern.pop()
        throw_it_away = False
        for p in pattern:
            if p.startswith(i):
                throw_it_away = True
                break
        if throw_it_away == False:
            yield i

print(list(iterate_patterns()))

Output:

['ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO', 'CEST', 'DBTSFDEO', 'EOEUDNBNUW', 'EAEUDNBNUW', 'FGH']