Line segments, overlap, and bits

[Sean Davis]

I am working with genomic data.  Basically, it consists of many tuples
of (start,end) on a line.  I would like to convert these tuples of
(start,end) to a string of bits where a bit is 1 if it is covered by
any of the regions described by the (start,end) tuples and 0 if it is
not.  I then want to do set operations on multiple bit strings (AND,
OR, NOT, etc.).  Any suggestions on how to (1) set up the bit string
and (2) operate on 1 or more of them?  Java has a BitSet class that
keeps this kind of thing pretty clean and high-level, but I haven't
seen anything like it for python.

Thanks,
Sean