This article is available online at http://www.jlr.orgOur laboratory, together with the University of California, San Diego group, pioneered the now widely accepted concept that oxidized phospholipids formed in the subendothelial space of the artery wall are responsible for initiating the early inflammatory response that is critical to the development of atherosclerosis (1-4). The recognition of oxidized phospholipids in the artery wall was established by using antibodies to oxidized phospholipids (5) and confirmed by our laboratory using MS (6). Oxidized phospholipids have been implicated in both pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory processes acting through multiple signaling pathways (7).We previously reported that adding 1 g of unsaturated (but not saturated) lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) to each gram of standard mouse chow induced dyslipidemia and systemic inflammation in LDL receptor (LDLR)-null mice similar to that seen when the mice were fed a Western diet (WD) (8,9). More recently, we demonstrated that the LPA-mediated dyslipidemia resulted in aortic atherosclerosis in LDLR-null mice that was similar in cellular characteristics to that seen on feeding these mice WD (10). Additionally, we presented evidence that in the enterocytes of